To put my position in context, I'm a folksong singer, with guitar and banjo, and I do (almost invariably) a solo act. I don't like to use sheet music or a cheat sheet, and will only do so for a situation like HearMe, where my audience can't see me. Don't really like it there.

In my twenties, (back in the late Pleistocene Era) I had a memory repertoire of (actual count) 130 songs, about half of which were what I'll call group one (see below) and the other half (what else?) group two.

Group One, to me, are those songs that are instantly ready in memory, ready to sing at the drop of a request.

What I call group two are songs that I know but I would have to work over a little to ensure my timing, or to remember just what chords to use, or perhaps on occasion to reconstruct the words, or the sequence of verses if it's not a story song, or where to capo to fit my voice.

Just in the last few years, in my late 60s, after a long (30 years?) lapse from performing, I am coming back to singing and playing, and many of those wonderful old songs are coming back, and of course I'm learning new ones too.

After that long preamble, what I'd like to discuss is, how large repertoires do Mudcatters "carry" in memory, what balance between group one and group two, what mnemonic devices they use to help organize the songs for planning gigs, and so forth.

I have a couple of tricks of my own that I use, and I'll talk about them later as they may become relevant to the discussion.

So how big a memory repertoire do you carry? What breakdown between group one and two? What tricks can you pass on? And anything else that bears on this sort of thing.

Dave Oesterreich