Green grows the Rashes – SMM – Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century

Performers: Brianna Robertson-Kirkland, Claire McBride, Beth Taylor, Tiffany Vong, Daniel Mészöly, Nicholas Montgomery

Song 77, volume 1

Burns described this song as being “the genuine language of my heart” after a passage in which he classifies men into “grave” and “merry” – hinting that he surely belonged to the second category. A bawdy version of this song can be found in the Merry Muses of Caledonia.

Famous as one of Burns’s most outspoken ‘feminist’ songs we thought all our female singers should be involved here and, in the workshop, we decided that each singing their own verse, with everyone singing the first and last verses worked well. We weren’t going to use a cello at first, but we quickly decided we needed one. There were issues with rhyming words here and we had to spend a bit of time making sense of the text.