The rather artificial construction of ‘Burns the bard’ sits somewhat at odds with Burns's true relationship to what is called today ‘folk culture’. The literati who hailed Burns as the ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ were actually complicit in a literary construct more to do with the age of sensibility when primitivism and the idea of the noble savage held sway, rather than simply receptive to genuinely untutored expression. Burns's folk culture encompassed bawdry, which he was careful not to present undiluted to the majority of his public, and ‘folk songs’, some of which he made more genteel in accordance with the tastes of the day. When commenting on the mores of the Ayrshire peasantry, Burns applied an Enlightenment anthropological lens, which again shows us the limited truth in Burns's often alleged ‘directness’ of, or simply ‘realistic’, expression. Truly, from an early age, Burns had imbibed family and regional culture that was not exactly in the cultural mainstream. His father's origins in the north-east, a strong Jacobite area in which some of the Burneses had been ‘out’ in support of the Stuarts in the early eighteenth century certainly contributed to Burns's interest in Jacobite song (though this seems to have been primarily a personal, imaginative choice rather than as a result of any direct support from his immediate family of ‘Whiggish’ Presbyterians). Also, it should be remembered that Jacobite song was often the work of a Tory, aristocratic class which became only from the late eighteenth century (and in large part because of Burns's influence) a staple part of a generalized Scottish ‘folk’ canon. Burns's love of song more generally, and love songs in particular, was first imbibed from his mother, Agnes Broun, who knew many old ballads. As well as ‘modernizing’ old Scottish songs, Burns also collected and preserved many such works, broadcasting these in such a way as to participate in the ‘folk’ revival that is one of the strong energies of the emerging Romantic period. From an old female servant of the Burnes family the poet also inherited a store of old supernatural stories, and these no doubt played a formative part in his imagination.