Poet, playwright, song-collector, antiquarian, editor, bookseller and early Enlightenment entrepreneur Allan Ramsay was born on 15 October, probably in 1684, at Leadhills, Lanarkshire, to John Ramsay (c.1660–1685) and Alice Bower (d.1700). When his father, a superintendent of the lead mines on the Hope family estate, died in Ramsay's infancy, his mother married local bonnet laird Andrew Crichton. Ramsay was probably educated at the parish school of Crawfordmuir until the time of his mother's death, when he was in his mid-teens. In early 1701, Ramsay moved to Edinburgh to undertake an apprenticeship in wig-making. He received back his indentures from his employer around 1709, opened his own periwig business, and was appointed a burgess of the city on 19 July 1710.

Ramsay's move to Edinburgh developed his intense interest in the literature of Scotland, both past and present, and Jacobite satirist, Latinist and physician Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713) was a significant early influence. The style of The Assembly and Babel, Pitcairne's satires on the Presbyterian church, would help Ramsay hone his own poetic voice even if he did not share Pitcairne's anti-Presbyterian sentiment. Furthermore, Pitcairne's protégé, the printer and classical scholar Thomas Ruddiman (1674–1757), would become Ramsay's chief publisher. James Watson's Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, both Ancient and Modern (1706, 1709, 1711) was an influential favourite, which introduced Ramsay to enduring Scottish literary forms, metres and styles, as well as the ways in which the Scottish canon could be anthologised. Contained within Watson's Collection is William Hamilton of Gilbertfield's (1665?–1751) ‘The Dying Words of Bonny Heck, A Famous Grey-Hound in the Shire of Fife’. This text, with its mock-tragic comedy and Standard Habbie verse form – named after Robert Sempill of Beltrees's (1595?–1663?) poem ‘The Life and Death of Habbie Simson, the Piper of Kilbarchan’ – helped Ramsay to crystallise his own literary style and Scots vernacular poetic mode. His early publication, the ‘Elegy on Maggy Johnston’, which borrows tone and form from Sempill and Hamilton, was probably written in 1711.