Experienced singers and performers can learn songs pretty quickly, and they can also read lyric sheets and even musical scores in a way that raises the roof, or whatever you want.
Some of the classic recordings of "our" kind of music were made by people who were looking at the lyrics.

So forget all that stuff about the qualitative differences between booked and unbooked singing. Time to be honest and admit that it isn't about that.

This is about people who aren't experienced singers and performers, who can't learn songs quickly, who don't know the songs that "we" know, and who want to participate. And beyond that, it is about whether and how they should be included. And it is an important issue.

You can say that singing groups have been "taken over" by the RUS, or you can be a little more honest and say that the new people that have come in to the groups are not experienced singers, have had different interests and tastes than the older members, and RUS was a way to include them.

More truth here: every organization, be it singing, stamp collecting, chess playing, or whatever, loses members over time due to attrition--people move away, have family obligations, develop new interests--don't blame it all on the blue books--

One of those notorious 80/20 rules has to do with a healthy group/organization/community needing to be 80 percent old and 20 percent new.

It's pretty much true--if there are too many new people, the group loses it's direction, if there are too few, it gradually disappears. And more disappear than the other.

Bottom line here is that folk groups of all kinds are walking a tightrope risking either losing direction or disappearing with every step. It's a worthy discussion, and I don't think it's accidental that the folks who are here engaged have all contributed a lot to what we little folk scene that we have today.



















Not so with some of the other stuff