More about this song
Burns wrote 'The Jolly Beggars', also commonly referred to as 'Love and Liberty - A Cantata' in 1785. The cantata of songs was never published in Robert Burns's lifetime.
It is believed that Burns was deterred from publishing the cantata by Rev. Dr. Hugh Blair (1718-1800) who declared that it was 'much too licentious'.
Indeed, 'The Jolly Beggars' rejects the values of conventional society and the authority of official culture in favour of vagrancy and the satisfaction of bodily appetites with alcohol and sex.
This type of literature would have been perceived as particularly inflammatory in the 1790s owing to the turbulent political climate caused by the French Revolution.
The 'Sodger Laddie' section of the cantata (also referred to as 'I Once was a Maid') is perhaps the most licentious of all, and this is the likely reason for its inclusion in the collection of bawdy songs The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1799).
This song tells the tale of a soldier's 'doxy'. An illegitimate child, she was born of illicit sex and her sexuality sustains her throughout her life. The doxy has always, then, remained on the outskirts of 'polite' society and possesses an alternative moral outlook.
This is most apparent when the doxy acknowledges, somewhat flippantly, that she has had an affair with a clergyman.
The final stanzas are representative of the message of 'The Jolly Beggars' as a whole. Despite misfortune, poverty and alienation from society, the doxy is still able to derive pleasure from her body: from alcohol, conviviality and love.
Pauline Mackay
