Comin' Thro' The Rye: A Song History

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"Comin' Thro' the Rye" is Robert Burns's reworking of an older Scottish song, and the Traditional Ballad Index records its author as unknown, with Burns as adapter.[1] His version was printed in the fifth volume of James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, which the Ballad Index and the scholar M. J. Grant date to 1796, while the Traditional Tune Archive gives 1797.[1][2][3] Grant notes that the same volume carried a second version that may have served as his model.[2] In the Morgan Library & Museum's set of the Museum, an inscription on the front flyleaf of volume five lists the song at page 431.[4] Citing James Fuld, the Index reports that the earliest texts, including the one Burns knew, were bawdy, and the Tune Archive likewise traces the song to a bawdy original that Burns collected.[1][3]

Painting of a young woman in a long dress standing in a field of tall golden grain

Winslow Homer, Coming through the Rye, oil on canvas, 1867. A painting named for the song.

The melody belongs to a family of Scottish fiddle tunes that James Dick, writing in 1898, gathered under the name "The Miller's Wedding," after its title in Robert Bremner's collection of 1757 to 1761, and Dick argued that the usual tune of "Auld Lang Syne" came from the same family.[2] Grant finds the two melodies close but distinct, and identifies the "Rye" tune's hallmark as the way it keeps coming back to the phrase sung on the title words.[2] Sources name the older tune differently: the Ballad Index cites Maurice Lindsay's Burns Encyclopedia for "The Miller's Wedding," while the Tune Archive says Burns's words were set to Bremner's "Miller's Daughter."[1][3] Where the "rye" lies is also debated: an Ayrshire legend, recalled in an essay on the University of Glasgow's STELLA site, places it at a ford on the river Rye, a tributary of the Garnock, while the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online simply glosses rye as a grain crop.[5][6]

Grant counts it among the best-loved Scottish songs, especially in America, and points to its prominent role in J. D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye as one sign of that standing.[2] The Ballad Index finds it in several American songsters and lists many songs written to its tune, from an 1868 college song to temperance and political campaign songs.[1] Early recordings include Ruth Vincent's for Columbia around 1906 and the soprano Marcella Sembrich's for Victor, made in Camden, New Jersey, on October 4, 1912.[1][7] Judy House includes it in Favorite Sing-Along Songs For The Mountain Dulcimer, an 85-page collection of familiar sing-along songs arranged for mountain dulcimer, published by Judy House.[8]

Our book that contains the song "Comin' Thro' The Rye"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Coming Through the Rye".
  2. Open Book Publishers: "M. J. Grant, Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture, Chapter 3: Burns's Song".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Comin' Thro' the Rye (1)".
  4. The Morgan Library & Museum: "The Scots Musical Museum".
  5. University of Glasgow, STELLA: "Burns and the Folksinger".
  6. Representative Poetry Online, University of Toronto: "Comin thro' the Rye".
  7. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix C-12474. Comin' thro' the rye / Marcella Sembrich".
  8. Judy House: "Favorite Sing-Along Songs For The Mountain Dulcimer".
  9. Image: Winslow Homer, Coming through the Rye, oil on canvas, 1867. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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