Dick Gaughan's defiant rendition of Adam McNaughton's song, with its repeated injunction to ‘Remember Thomas Muir’, is a starkly commemorative act. In presenting a narrative of its subject's life, it plays a consciously didactic role. Like all attempts to recover and reanimate ‘hidden’ or ‘forgotten’ pasts, its message rests in part on the idea that there is a likely or existing failure to remember its subject appropriately or with a due sense of his significance. That Muir's life was ‘historically significant’ has been commemorated in another sense, by his inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in a typically lucid essay by Harry Dickinson. This rendering of Muir's life sits neatly within Dickinson's own extensive work on the 1790s. It highlighted the interactions of constitutionalism and the universalism of the French Revolution within the context provided by an increasingly militant loyalism and sought to examine the relationship between political ideas and political actions:

As Dickinson's essay also made clear, the contemporary sources for the life of Muir are limited. Biographies (including a recent and very thoroughly researched biographical novel) have rested on government reports and the account of Muir's trial, a smattering of letters, pamphlets, travel accounts, and French and Spanish records.