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Description: | Verse 1: 'Since all thy vows, false maid, Are blown to air, And my poor heart betray'd To sad despair, Into some wilderness, My grief I will express, And thy hard heartedness, O cruel fair.'
The 'Scots Musical Museum' is the most important of the numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections of Scottish song. When the engraver James Johnson started work on the second volume of his collection in 1787, he enlisted Robert Burns as contributor and editor. Burns enthusiastically collected songs from various sources, often expanding or revising them, whilst including much of his own work. The resulting combination of innovation and antiquarianism gives the work a feel of living tradition.
This song is also known by the name of 'Lament of Sir James Chisholm of Cromleck (Cromlet)'. Alive around 1600, this song relates his tragic love affair. The music and the words both have a seventeenth century courtly air in the rhythm of a galliard. As a result it is thought to have been performed as a court solo. It was first printed in Ramsay's 'Tea-Table Miscellany' (1724-7) and continued to be sporadically reprinted until its appearance in the 'Museum'. | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0 | Publisher: | National Library of Scotland | Temporal: | 1787-01-01 - 1803-12-31 | Source: | Burns Scotland | Identifier: | Volume II, song 199, page 207 - 'Cromlet | Go to resource |
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