Essay on Robert Tannahill and Robert Burns by Jim Ferguson completed Jan 2024
Title: Tannahill and Burns: A Politics of Archetype in Literary Art
click on title or image below to access essay in Glasgow Review of Books
Robert Tannahill 1774-1810
Robert Tannahill was born in Paisley on 3rd June 1774. He worked as a weaver for most of his life, starting as an apprentice to his father around the age of twelve. Best known as a song-writer, he wrote around 100 songs between 1800 and 1810, there were also poems and one play, 'The Soldier's Return'. In 1805 he was a founding member and Secretary of the Paisley Burns Club: one of the first formally constituted Burns clubs in the world. I have spent a few years studying Tannahill's life and work, and at certain periods that study became quite intense, particularly between the years 2004 and 2010. I have written extensively on Tannahill and was perhaps the first writer to investigate Tannahill's interest in Thomas Moore (1779-1852) and Irish song. Click the image below to read my essay "Robert Tannahill and Irish Song". Other essays I have written on Tannahill include "War, Empire, Slavery: Radicalism in the work of Robert Tannahill", "An Ecological Circle: Circularity in Tannahill's Song" and "Peace is the Prize: on Tannahill's The Soldier's Return".
Below is a link to Tannahill's Jacobite version of the song 'Hielan Laddie'. The tune was well known to James Hogg (1770-1835). There are several versions of this tune with different words, it has been transmitted through the folk tradition down the generations and is presently popular as a sea-shanty linking Scotland and Canada. Authorship of the words sang here was attributed to Tannahill by his friend R. A. Smith (1780-1829) and the lyrics appear in 'The Scottish Minstrel' of 1822 which Smith compiled and edited.
