George,

I share your concerns about the decline of singing (any kind of singing) as a social activity. As to what we can do about this - well, I wish I knew the answer. As an illustration of the difficulties involved, here's a piece of family history.

My two sons were exposed to records, radio, and live music from the cradle, and carted off to weekend folk festivals as soon as they were tent-trained. Both played instruments reasonably competently by the age of five or six, performed in the family band before they were ten, and were running bands of their own by their mid-teens. After graduating from university and starting out in "sensible" careers, both were getting so many gigs that they decided to quit their day jobs and become full-time musicians... but neither of them sing!

When they were kids, they refused - very emphatically - to sing, despite massive encouragement from parents, teachers and (adult)family friends). They always seemed unable or unwilling to explain why - but as far as I could tell, they found the idea of singing themselves deeply embarrassing. Moreover, they seemed to feel uncomfortable in the presence of anybody else who was singing live and unamplified - regardless of the genre of the song, or the quality of the singer.

This seems to be a fairly common phenomenon. At festivals, the sessions are crammed with frighteningly talented young instrumentalists, but in the singarounds, young vocalists are rarely noticable. Does anyone out there have any ideas on why this happens, and what we can do about it?

Wassail!