A Red, Red Rose

In 1794, he wrote to Alexander Cunningham that he and Thomson disagreed on the song's merits, "What to me appears to be the simple and the wild, to him, and I suspect to you likewise, will be looked on as the ludicrous and the absurd.

"[2]: 367 At the time, Thomson's publishing project was rivaled by the Italian musician Pietro Urbani who called his anthology A Selection of Scots Songs.

Burns recalls, "I likewise gave (Urbani) a simple old Scots song which I had pickt up in this country, which he had promised to set in a suitable manner.

[6] A ballad originating from the same period entitled "The Turtle Dove" also contains similar lines, such as "Though I go ten thousand mile, my dear" and "Oh, the stars will never fall down from the sky/Nor the rocks never melt with the sun".

[8] A poem in this collection, "The loyal Lover's faithful promise to his Sweet-heart on his going on a long journey" also contains similar verses such as "Althou' I go a thousand miles" and "The day shall turn to night, dear love/And the rocks melt in the sun".

[9] Midway through the ballad, Burns' first stanza can be found almost verbatim: "Her Cheeks are like the Roses, that blossoms fresh in June; O shes like some new-strung Instrument thats newly put in tune."

"Major Graham" is so similar to an earlier song called "Miss Admiral Gordon's Strathspey" that one writer referred to Gow's tune as a "palpable plagiarism".

This tune bears striking similarities to the eventual melody which would make the song famous, and "Major Gordon" is often mislabeled as the source.

[14] Marshall's tune is actually called "Mrs. Hamilton of Wishaw's Strathspey", and it was published in the composer's Early Scottish Melodies.

[15] Thomson's choice yielded similarly clumsy results as Urbani's, requiring alterations and additions to Burns' text to fit Marshall's melody.

In fact, he wrote to George Thomson in 1793, "Low down in the broom—In my opinion, deserves more properly a place among your lively and humorous Songs.

"[11]: 66 Burns' lyric was not paired with "Low Down in the Broom" until Robert Archibald Smith published the third volume of his Scotish Minstrel in 1821.

[1]: 81  "Major Graham" gives stress to the wrong syllables in Burns' text so much that the entire focus of the song shifts to the narrator away from his love.

[1]: 75–76 [failed verification] Robert Schumann set Burns' poem in German as "Dem roten Röslein gleicht mein Lieb" for piano and voice.

[23] A Swedish version of the poem, "Min älskling [sv] (du är som en ros)", was made famous by Evert Taube in his 1943 book Ballads in Bohuslän.