Auld Lang Syne compiled by Karen Dolby [Book Review]

Auld Lang Syne: Words to Songs You Used to Know compiled by Karen Dolby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a song book of many of the songs that you’ve probably heard growing up, or maybe down the pub if you frequent that sort of pub.

Auld Lang Syne compiled by Karen Dolby

Auld Lang Syne is a collection of songs organised by theme. They’re not quite folk songs, but popular implies the wrong thing. These are songs that ordinary people sing, rather than professional musicians (although many have been recorded by the latter). Each song has its lyrics, and is followed by notes on when it was written, who has recorded it and what the tune is. There are also notes explaining the context of some of the songs.

The sections are:

country life
thoughts of home
love and loss
a fool for love
men at arms
life at sea
children’s songs
popular hymns
festive songs

There are 94 songs in the book, so I’m not going to list every single one. If you need to see I suggest using the ‘look inside’ feature on amazon to read the index. Many of the songs included are notable, and you’ll probably know snatches of all of them. I bought the book so that I could use it for reference when writing stories, it adds verisimilitude if people sing sometimes! The songs I had been thinking of that are included in Auld Lang Syne were:

I’d say no prizes for guessing what period the story was in, but actually it might not be that obvious. So feel free to guess in the comments section for the kudos of getting it right!

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