The Soldier's Joy
Scottish Country Dance Instruction
THE SOLDIER'S JOY (R8x32) 3C (4C set) RSCDS Book 21- 8 1s cast and dance down own side below 3s and lead up to places
9-16 1s+2s+3s dance RH across and LH back to places
17-24 1s lead down the middle and back to top
25-32 1s+2s dance Poussette. 213
(MINICRIB. Dance crib compiled by Charles Upton, Deeside Caledonian Society, and his successors)
Keith Rose's Crib Diagram
Dance Instruction Videos
The Soldier's Joy - Scottish Country Dancing Instruction VideoDance Information
The titles Soldier's Joy and Sodger Laddie both long pre-date the formation of the RSCDS and were already well-established tunes in Britain by the late eighteenth century. Soldier's Joy appears in printed sources from at least the mid-1700s and circulated widely throughout Britain, Ireland, and North America. Sodger Laddie is similarly old, appearing in song collections of the same period. These tunes were part of the general musical vocabulary of the time and were not originally tied to Scotland alone.Robert Burns's cantata The Jolly Beggars provides the earliest clear literary association between these titles and specific songs, but only one of the connections is provable. In the first printed edition of 1799, the song beginning 'I once was a maid...' is explicitly marked 'Tune - Sodger Laddie', confirming that Burns intended or accepted that melody. This attribution is consistently preserved in early nineteenth-century reprints and modern critical editions, so there is no doubt about it.
The situation with Soldier's Joy is different. The song beginning 'I am a son of Mars...' carries no tune heading in Burns's manuscript or in the first printed editions. Nineteenth-century editors later supplied tunes of their own choosing for performance purposes, and, because the text is sung by a soldier, the well-known tune Soldier's Joy became a natural candidate. However, no eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century source links these words with that specific tune. Scholarly editions note that the original melody is unknown.
When the RSCDS later adopted The Soldier's Joy as a dance title, they were using the name of a tune that had already circulated independently for more than a century and that had multiple associations across Britain, not a title originating in Scotland or directly from Burns.
The Soldier's Joy, From Glen Collection Of Printed Music, Skye Collection Of Best Reels And Strathspeys, Page 38, c. 1887
Image from (cropped) National Library Of Scotland, licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0.
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