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Origin of Auld Lang Syne?

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I llustration to Robert Burns' poem  Auld Lang Syne  by J.M. Wright and Edward Scriven . The words and music of  Auld Lang Syne  are of uncertain origin. The tune  had been around for generations. It was already in vogue in the 1790s when Haydn arranged a classic variation on the theme: Some of the words were also already in circulation decades before their first publication in 1796, in an anthology of traditional Scottish verse. Attribution went posthumously to Robert Burns. This was misleading. Burns himself had not claimed authorship when he submitted Auld Lang Syne to the   Scots Musical Museum   in 1788. “...an  old song , of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man.” [8] This ‘old man’ has never been identified. It seems likely that at least some of the words came from an older folk song published by James Watson in 1711. These lines seem, ahem, similar: Should Old Acquaintance be forgot, and never thought