Dance The Lass o' Livingston 3722

The bonny lass of Liviston,
  Her name ye ken, her name ye ken;

These two opening lines to the old anonymous ballad are all that can be reprinted here.

William Stenhouse states that, although the tune was inserted in Mrs Crockat’s Music Book of 1709, “in all probability it is fully a century earlier; for Ramsay, who was born in 1684, gives it as an ancient tune”. “The Lass of Leving-stone” is found in Henry Playford’s A Collection of Original Scots Tunes of 1700. New, purified verses to the song were written by Allan Ramsay. The verses appeared in 1724 and they were included in William Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonius of 1725. Ramsay’s song also was included in James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum, Volume 1, 1787, and so mediocre are they that one verse is sufficient.

Pain’d with her slighting Jamie’s love,
  Bell dropt a tear, Bell dropt a tear;
The gods descended from above,
  Well pleas’d to hear, well pleas’d to hear
They heard the praises of the youth
  From her own tongue, from her own tongue,
Who now converted was to truth,
  And thus she sung, and thus she sung.

The old original “The Lass o’ Liviston” was collected by Burns and is included in The Merry Muses of Caledonia. In his notes on the song Burns says, “The original set of verses to this tune is still extant, and have a very great deal of poetic merit, but are not quite ladies’ reading.” Perhaps not, but they are superior in their way to Ramsay’s stilted English-style posturing.

In The Songs of Scotland, Prior to Burns, edited by Robert Chambers, LL.D., 1890, there is the following amusing footnote: “We learn from the Memoirs of Alexander Carlyle, that the actual bonnie lass of Livingstone was living in that district in 1744, by which time she must have reached a mature period of life. Being storm-stayed in November that year on his way to Glasgow, Carlyle spent three days at the little solitary auberge of Whitburn, when at length a returning postchaise enabled him to complete his journey. The landlady, whom he characterises as a ‘sensible woman’, ‘had in her youth been celebrated in a song as the bonnie lass of Livingstone’. ‘The walls and windows’, he adds, ‘were all scrawled with poetry; and I amused myself not a little in composing a satire on my predecessors, which I also inscribed on the walls, to the great delight of my landlady, who shewed it for many years afterwards with vanity to her travellers’.”