Burns Club Atlanta Burns Club of Atlanta is fifty-third in seniority among several hundred organizations recognized by the Scottish-based World Burns Federation. Officially organized on January 25, 1896, the centennial year of Robert Burns’ birth, the Burns Club of Atlanta is quite possibly the city’s oldest surviving cultural and literary society. As early as the 1870s, Burns admirers in Atlanta had been meeting in private homes and hotels to celebrate the birthday of the Scottish poet. Shortly after the club’s formation, plans were made to construct for a clubhouse an exact replica of Robert Burns' birthplace in Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland. Situated in the
Music of Scotland middle class audience. In the 1790s Robert Burns embarked on an attempt to produce a corpus of Scottish national song contributing about a third of the songs of "The Scots Musical Museum". Burns also collaborated with George Thomson in "A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs", which adapted Scottish folk songs with "classical" arrangements. However, Burns' championing of Scottish music may have prevented the establishment of a tradition of European concert music in Scotland, which faltered towards the end of the eighteenth century. From the mid-nineteenth century classical music began a revival in Scotland, aided by the visits of Chopin