My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns's love song, for 2 to 4 singers, sung to the tune "Low down in the Broom" as R. A. Smith printed it in The Scotish Minstrel. Two verses: the soprano sings the melody, and the alto, tenor and bass sing the words beneath it. Slow and tender.
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The first verse
Words: Robert Burns (1794)Tune: traditional Scottish, "Low down in the Broom", as printed by R. A. Smith
O, my love is like a red, red rose, That's newly sprung in June!O, my love is like a melodie That sweetly play'd in tune!As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in love am I;And I will love thee still, my dear, 'Till a' the seas gang dry.'Till a' the seas gang dry my dear, 'Till a' the seas gang dry,And I will love thee still, my dear, 'Till a' the seas gang dry.
About My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose
My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose is Robert Burns's love song. Its earliest known printing, in Peter Urbani's Selection of Scots Songs (1794), has Urbani's own tune. The fifth volume of James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, which libraries date to 1796, sets it to a strathspey called Major Graham, with an "Old Set" too. By the late 1840s, G. F. Graham could write that it was "now invariably sung to a modern version of 'Low down in the broom'", the tune we sing. Our arrangement is read from R. A. Smith's Scotish Minstrel of the early 1820s, which prints Burns's words to that air, in C, with four parts of our own over Smith's piano chords. This is two verses for 2 to 4 singers, slow and tender, each ending on Smith's repeated lines, "'Till a' the seas gang dry" and "Tho' 'twere ten thousand mile".
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