The Songs of Scotland by Allan Cunningham

Allan Cunningham (7 December 1784 – 30 October 1842)*

Fraud, Forger and Poet

Although we ordered one of those cheap modern digital reprints of Allan Cunningham's Songs of Scotland, I didn't think it would matter much. After all, what matters is that we can read his introduction, as much as the poetry his once-famous anthology contains.

I didn't bargain on the cheap modern reprint containing only the introduction.  Ah, well!  You win some, you lose some.  Here's where to find it in the Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  (Catalogue entry.)

Cunningham was a bit of a fraud - he made up poems as well as including genuine old Scottish poems.  Still, although in the 1820s his peers thought he was a fraud, within a few years of his death, he was revered as a poet in his own right. 

The wording of his introduction shows us his poetic interpretation of the history of Scotland's poetry.  Interesting!

* Whilst we wouldn't recommend Wikipedia as a trusty source for an essay, the basic details of Cunningham's life and output are here for a start.

Fred Freeman - Recordings of Burns and Tannahill Songs

If you were at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's Exchange Talk this evening, you may be keen to hear the recordings that Dr Fred Freeman was talking about.  It will have come as a surprise to many that Tannahill wrote songs with an Irish theme, as well as his many Scottish poems.

We have all three of his Tannahill recordings in the Whittaker Library - see here.


We also have his Robert Burns recordings - see here.

If you're interested in the old music publications that Fred referred to, we commend Geor Thomson's Scottish songbooks and R. A. Smith's Scotish Minstrel books, of which we have examples in our Special Collections.  See our catalogue!

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Paisley poet weaver Robert Tannahill had a tragically short life, but his output made a huge impact. You can find a lot of digitised Tannahill material on Archive.org.

Another scholar who has worked on Tannahill's poetic contribution is Jim Ferguson, whose PhD at the University of Glasgow was a study of Tannahill's correspondence.  You can read this online, here:-

Ferguson, Jim (2011) - A weaver in wartime: a biographical study and the letters of Paisley weaver-poet Robert Tannahill (1774-1810). PhD thesis.