The melody which Burns originally used for A Rosebud By My Early Walk was composed by David Sillar, a teacher at Irvine in Ayrshire, and is reminiscent of the air to John Anderson, My Jo - that is the air published in Johnson's Musical Museum. It seems to have been in the 1840s, when Wood & Co. published their "Songs of Scotland" that they took it upon themselves to declare that the original tune had "no merit" and put the words to a version of another tune called The Shepherd's Wife - published as an air by Gow, among others.