Ron, learning a song or two is hardly "an exhibition of skills." Children do it all the time.

And lighten up, Goatfell. Nobody said what you said they said.

The point here is not whether one person with a dicey memory needs to use song sheets, it's about the whole group. If you need them, well, okay, use them.

In fact, at the Coffeehouse Reunion Concert at the 2003 Northwest Folklife Festival ("Geezers' Concert") one of this area's more staunch singers walked up to the mic with a three-ring binder, confessed that his memory for a lot of the songs was not as good as it used to be, and he put the binder on a music stand and opened it. No problem. The thing was, however, that he didn't stand there with the binder in front of his face, he looked at the audience as he always had, and whenever he felt a lapse of memory coming on, he would glance quickly at the song sheet without interrupting the song, and keep right on going.

Basically, he knew the songs. He just needed an occasional cue. He wasn't reading off a song he didn't already know.

I can see some merit in this. I think it's much better, as someone alluded to above, to have a song sheet within eyeshot, if needed from time to time, than it is to put an audience through the discomfort of waiting for you to come up with the next line while watching you stare at the ceiling as if trying to find the lyrics written somewhere up there.

There is some high-powered precedence for having music or song sheets handy. I noticed that on "The Three Tenors" special over public television (Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and José Carreras), there was a music stand in front of each of these powerhouse singers. Dark orchestral stands so they were unobtrusive, place about waist high, not blocking the view, but where each singer could see his just by glancing down.

Now, all three of them have sung hundreds of concerts and recitals, and dozens of operatic roles. They have memorized full-length operas and hundreds of songs and arias. Yet—even they are subject to the occasional memory lapse. That's why, during an opera performance, there is someone with a copy of the score sitting in the prompter's box out of sight of the audience. And in recital, the pianist is there to quietly feed them a line if necessary. Or the conductor if the accompaniment is orchestral. The singer usually stands fairly close to the conductor, who has the score right there in front of him.

Hence, the music stands. The three tenors were going to be singing a couple of dozen songs of various kinds during the concert, and since it was in front of a large live audience and it was being televised nationally (taped "live" to be played repeatedly, especially during public television pledge breaks), having the music in front of them—just in case—was preferable to working without a net.

During the whole program, I think I saw them glance at the stands maybe four or five times altogether, but this was usually between songs during the applause, probably asking themselves "Okay, what's next?" They knew the songs they were singing, they were certainly not just singing them from the music.

Singing out of books, or even one specific agreed-upon book:    okay, if that's what a group of people want to get together and do, then fine. Do it. It's a free country. The Constitution gives you the right of Freedom of Assembly.

But as Barry pointed out above, and for the reasons stated by Midchuck just above, the chances are that the strong, more experience singers probably won't be in evidence.

Don Firth

P. S. Let me reiterate:    There is nothing wrong with song books, song sheets, or music stands. It's the way they are sometimes used.