Robert Burns's Hand in "Ay Waukin, O": The Roy Manuscript and William Tytler's Dissertation (1779)

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Abstract

This illustrated discussion reexamines the sorces amd manuscripts for one of Burns's best-known songs, "Ay Waukin, O," first published as song 213 in James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, vol. III (1790). Among sources, the discussion highlights an often neglected (and misdated) printed source for two of the four stanzas. The discussion of manuscripts identifies one manuscript treated as authentic by Kinsley as being an Antique Smith forgery; details the provenance, and so purpose, of the only extant full-length manuscript (now at the Birthplace Museum); makes a detailed reexamination of the Roy manuscript and its pencilled additions, with enlarged and enhanced illustrations, and clarifies the relationship among the three genuine manuscripts to argue that the Roy manuscript represents a particularly significant composition stage. This discussion, the fifth in a series about manuscripts in the University of South Carolina's G. Ross Roy Collection, is designed to complement and expand on the critical apparatus for this song in a forthcoming volume of forthcoming Oxford Edition of Robert Burns.

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