Robert Burns’ Songs

The Secular and the Profance

Robert Burns
The 2007 Linn Recordings [CKD 289] Crossreferred to the 1968 Clarendon edition of
‘The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns’ edited in 3 volumes by James Kinsley.

Click to downloadPDF INDEX TO THE SONGS OF ROBERT BURNS.It's free.

If you have, or intend to get, any of the Linn recordings of ‘The Complete Songs of Robert Burns’ this index will help you find the relevant text in‘The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns’ edited byJames Kinsley . (Clarendon Press, 1968) - far and away the best edition. Or you could edit the text to suit the page numbers of your preferred edition.

The PDF is laid out to print A5 double sided and fold in half as an A6 booklet. The INDEX contains the following information in the following order.

  • CD number and track number
  • First line as in KinsleyNOT the Linn track ‘titles’ which are inconsistent and inaccurate.
  • Poem/song number in Kinsley - Kinsley volume number - Page number

For some mad reason my set of Linn CDs are numbered consecutively from 1 to 10 then; 11, 11b, 12. I eschew such silliness so in my index Linn's 11b is my 12, their 12 my 13.

Book sewing The booklet can be stapled or sewn together. Being a book-nerd I prefer the latter. In case you don't know how, make a small hole with a needle about ¾” in from the top edge plus another 4 evenly-spaced holes about 1” apart through the centre fold of the pages. Starting from the centre inside, sew as in the diagram at left. [Click to enlarge.] Tie A and B together on the inside of the centre-fold to finish. Enjoy !

That Burns should feature on a website now focussed on my family history is not entirely inappropriate. As a young girl, a relation of mine called Alicia Flint [1828-1912] metClarinda , more properly known as Mrs Agnes McLehose, when the latter was “then a very old lady.”Clarinda was the recipient of and respondent to a series of passionate letters fromSylvander , a.k.a. Robert Burns. For more about that, seeAlicia FlintAccording to some,Clarinda was lead female in several songs inThe Merry Muses e.g. ‘I'll Tell You a Tale of a Wife’.Clarinda was evidently familiar with at least a bowdlerized version of ‘I Rede You Beware O the Ripples Young Man’ which she referred to as ‘The Moor-hen’, urging Burns in a letter dated 6 February 1788 not to publish “for your sake and for mine.” Fortunately her advice seems to have been ignored, by someone at any rate.

Robert Burns’ Merry Muse

85 Melodies for ‘The Merry Muses of Caledonia’

Apart from being a poet in his own right, Burns was also an avid collector of both lyrics and melodies of traditional songs. Many deal with matters of the flesh. I transcribed, for my own amusement, 85 tunes for most of the lyrics contained in the work generally referred to, although not by Burns himself, as ‘The Merry Muses Of Caledonia’ [hereafter ‘M.M.C.’], a work ascribed in varying amounts - depending on the editor - to Robert Burns. I arranged these 85 melodies with introduction, indices etc to print on A4 sheets which, when folded in half, can be stapled or sewn together as an A5 booklet. It is anaide-mémoire rather than a typographical gem.

I have not bothered with asterisks or hyphens other than as required to encode the ABC music notation. If you are likely to be offended by four-letter wordsen clair ,THERE'S THE DOOR ! On the other handDOWNLOAD SAMPLE PAGESor click the Merry Muses button below to see similar.

The poems and tunes follow the sequence in which they appear in ‘M.M.C.’ edited by James Barke and Sydney Goodsir Smith, [W. H. Allen, London, 1965]. While I have used the text from the Barke/Smith edition, James Kinsley (‘Poems and Songs of R.B.’ Clarendon, 1968) is more accurate and usually better, but Kinsley omits many of the songs included in most editions of the M.M.C., including that of Barke/Smith, because they are deemed to contain little or no original Burns. There have been reprints of the Barke/Smith edition including a very poor one from Luath Press so beware! but second-hand copies of the Allen publication are not hard to find.

If you want the whole lot, i.e. all 85 melodies, use the PayPal button below to pay£7 into my Paypal account. On receipt I will post to you a printed copy of all 85 tunes with introduction, list of contents and the indices. Unless requested otherwise, the outside of the front cover will be left blank for you to add whatever title or image you wish. I have a rather obscene image on the front of mine [see flipbook] which may well not be to everyone's taste ! The cover is printed on thicker paper than the rest of the pages.

Duncan Linklater© 2025