Document Type
Article
Abstract
Identifies Burns's "English" source that he put into "Scots dress'"for the song 'It is na, Jean, thy bonie face." first published in James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, IV (1792); reviews the evidence that Burns had read the source identified, in Juvenile Poems (1789), by John Armstrong (1771-1797), then a student at Edinburgh University; and explores why Davidson Cook's previous record of this identification, in 1918, has been lost to subsequent Burns scholarship. [in the original article, which was linked at http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/guest-blog-by-professor-patrick-scott-a-burns-puzzle-solved-davidson-cook-and-the-english-original-for-it-is-na-jean-thy-bonie-face-smm-333/, a brief afterword by Murray Pittock put the (re)discovery in the context of other current work on Burns attribution.] The original posting seems to have disappeared from the Glasgow project site. The copy attached here is a slightly revised version as published in Burns Chronicle, 126 (2017), 42-46.
Publication Info
1 Editing Burns for the 21st Century, 2016.