“Do you know Aung Lang Syne.?”
Not every song survives for *centuries. Fewer still cross oceans, cultures, and languages. Long before champagne toasts and midnight kisses, a centuries-old Scottish ballad was whispered in taverns, echoed across battlefields, and now sung at midnight as the global anthem of remembrance. A tune of parting, memory, and old friends not yet forgotten.
We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for Aung Lang Syne.
Kicking off a mass sing along the opening line is know by all:
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?”
Setting off everyone in ear shot to join in. And one night a year it strikes up the whole globe in a shared chorus spilling across continents, time zones, and languages. People raise their voices together, normally off-key, to sing a song most don’t entirely understand. So, what are we really singing about? What does this centuries-old Scottish ballad echoing through Times Square, Tokyo, and countless midnight living rooms mean?
This is the story of Auld Lang Syne: a song of memory and ritual, of love and loss, and of the deeply human need to hold onto what matters even as time insists, we move forward.
A Song We Know by Heart
If you’re anything like me, at some point in time Auld Lang Syne has brought tears to your eyes, even when the half-English, half-Gaelic only made half sense to you. There is something in the power of the song that, despite not knowing what the words are, roots itself into your heart and touches that primal piece of you that remembers people who loved you.
Yet, we cannot deny, Auld Lang Syne is confusing. The language is old Scots, and unless you’ve spent time studying Robert Burns, you’d be forgiven for not knowing what “auld lang syne” even means.
Loosely translated, it means “old long since”, or more poetically, “for old times’ sake.” It’s a phrase about honoring the past and the people in it. But as musicologist M.J. Grant notes in her definitive study Auld Lang Syne: A Song and Its Culture (2021), the real power of the song lies not in its translation, but in its “…ritualised sense of parting and remembering—its ability to give communal shape to transition” [1].
And that’s what makes it so enduring. It’s less about what it says and more about what it makes us feel.
Robert Burns and the Art of Memory
Contrary to popular belief, Robert Burns didn’t write Auld Lang Syne from scratch. In 1788, he sent the lyrics to the Scots Musical Museum, describing it as “an old song, of which I had heard fragments” [2]. In other words, Burns collected and reshaped a traditional folk tune, refining its themes of friendship and time into something universal.
He took the loose oral tradition and gave it permanence. His version taps into deep currents of human experience: shared labor (“we twa hae run about the braes”), separation, reunion, and forgiveness. As Fraser (2023) explains in his review of Grant’s work, the song reflects Burns’ personal longing and cultural context “…a Scotland at the cusp of modernity, caught between nostalgia for what was lost and apprehension about what lay ahead” [3].
Originally, Burns’ lyrics were set to a different melody. The version we now recognize and the one that gets played at midnight on New Year’s Eve, was paired with the lyrics in 1799 in The Scots Musical Museum and later popularized through 19th-century collections.
It’s a pentatonic melody, meaning it uses only five notes. This simplicity makes it easy to remember and sing even in large crowds or emotionally charged moments. It also gives the song an almost chant-like quality, perfect for sharing across cultures and communities. You don’t have to be a native Scots or a music major to join in, just listen and sing along.
Music historian Dick (1892) suggests that this tune’s longevity lies in its ability to blend the “plaintive and the celebratory” [4]. That duality of joy and sorrow, past and future is exactly why it became the soundtrack for transitions of all kinds.
A New Year’s Tradition Is Born
Fun fact, there’s nothing in the lyrics of Auld Lang Syne that explicitly references New Year’s Eve. So how did it become the song of the moment?
Enter Guy Lombardo, a Canadian bandleader who began playing the song during his live New Year’s Eve broadcasts from New York in the late 1920s. Lombardo’s 1929 radio broadcast sealed the deal, and soon the song became a New Year’s staple in the U.S. and eventually around the world [5].
But even before Lombardo, the song was sung on Hogmanay, the traditional Scottish celebration of the New Year. In that setting, the song marked the passage of time, the remembering of old friends, and the hope for reconciliation and peace in the year to come.
As Grant (2021) puts it, “Auld Lang Syne is not a song of beginning—it is a song of release. It helps us let go of what must be left behind, while affirming what is worth carrying forward” [1].
Why the Whole World Sings It
One of the most fascinating aspects of Auld Lang Syne is its global reach. The song is now performed at:
Farewells and funerals
Graduation ceremonies
End-of-year parties
Political transitions
Even sporting events
How did it spread so widely?
Part of the answer lies in British colonial and diasporic networks, which carried Scottish songs across the globe. Another part lies in the universal emotional terrain the song covers. Memory, parting, friendship, and time, themes that are not culturally bound.
Anthropologist D. McCrone (2022) argues that Auld Lang Syne functions as a “cultural utility song” a flexible tool for public sentiment, adaptable to many contexts yet always pointing back to our shared mortality and memory [6].
Despite the song’s ubiquity, many people sing it without knowing what they’re saying. So, here’s a brief breakdown of the most famous lines:
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?”
Should we forget old friends, and never think of them again?
“We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.”
Let’s share a drink to honor old times.
“We twa hae run about the braes, and pu’d the gowans fine.”
We two have wandered the hills, picking daisies in our youth.
Burns’ use of Scots dialect isn’t ornamental; but uses these lines as a way to root them in everyday human intimacy grounding the song in real speech for real people.
As Grant notes, “The charm of the song lies in how it doesn’t glorify the past—it simply remembers it, warts and all” [1].
There’s a reason this song makes people cry at midnight. It isn’t triumphant. It doesn’t celebrate the future or scream “new year, new me.” In a world obsessed with beginnings, Auld Lang Syne gives us permission to mourn what’s ending.
That may be the loss of a year, or the memory of someone no longer in the room, or even a younger version of ourselves. The song carries emotional gravity, but it doesn’t demand catharsis. It simply asks “Do you remember?”
And in answering, together, we affirm that the past matters and that it lives in us still.
From Hollywood to Your Heart
“Auld Lang Syne” has also become a cinematic shorthand for emotional climax.
In It’s a Wonderful Life, it plays as the community rallies around George Bailey. In When Harry Met Sally, it becomes a metaphor for the unspoken spaces between people. Even in Pixar’s Toy Story 4, the melody makes an appearance.
Why? Because the song triggers an emotional collective memory, even when heard out of context.
As Dolby (2015) notes, “The song is a vessel. Whether at a Scottish ceilidh or a high school graduation, it carries the emotional freight of parting” [7]. At its heart, Auld Lang Syne is a song about connection. It doesn’t pretend time can be stopped. It doesn’t offer easy optimism. Instead, it gives us something more honest: remembrance without regret, nostalgia without paralysis. A chance to look back before we step forward.
And maybe that’s all we really need. Just a moment, a melody, and a memory to hold us together.
📚 SOURCES
Grant, M.J. (2021). Auld Lang Syne: A Song and Its Culture. Open Book Publishers.
https://books.google.com/books?id=w8tUEAAAQBAJ
Burns, R. (1788). Letter to Scots Musical Museum, as quoted in Dick, J. & Inglis, A.W. (1892). Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
http://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/psas/article/download/6488/6457
Fraser, I. (2023). “Auld Lang Syne and Western Traditions of New Year.” Ethnomusicology Forum.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17411912.2022.2127116
Dick, J. & Inglis, A.W. (1892). Auld Lang Syne: Its Origin, Poetry, and Music. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
Roth, A. (2022). “Happy New Year!” Journal of Erie Studies.
https://www.jeserie.org/uploads/%2336%20Classic%20BN%20Roth.pdf
McCrone, D. (2022). “Whose Song Is It Anyway?” Scottish Affairs Journal.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/scot.2022.0412
Dolby, K. (2015). Auld Lang Syne: Words to Songs You Used to Know.