History

The Tea-Table Miscellany (TTM) was an enormously successful collection of traditional song, assembled by Allan Ramsay in four volumes between 1723 and 1737, more than twenty-five years before Dr John Gregory's 1763 paper to the Edinburgh Philosophical Society which – perhaps for the first time – ‘distinguished between classical and folk music’. In some ways a product at the upper end of the chapbook and broadside market, in others an artfully confected means of creating a hybrid and genteel basis for selling apparently ‘indigenous’ song to a middle-class audience, the TTM was a raging success. The first volume initially appeared in 1723, with an impression also issued on 1 January 1724; the second in 1726, the third in 1727 (as did A New Miscellany of Scots Sangs) and the fourth and last ten years later. The collection went through some fifteen editions (the numbering of editions is inexact as we shall see) in Ramsay's lifetime and was reprinted thirty-five times by 1800, while other collections used many of its songs. Almost a century later, The Times described Ramsay as ‘entitled to the credit of having inaugurated cheap literature’, a more than backhanded compliment signifying Ramsay's role as a canonical midwife to the fugitive literature of the streets. In reality, while The Lass of Peatie's Mill circulated separately in broadside format in 1718, and other songs such as Bonny Boatman and Lochaber No More continued to circulate in broadside form – quite possibly not approved by Ramsay – into the mid 1720s, Ramsay's sources were more genteel.