Thank you guest.
The greatest barrier to overcome when attempting to encourage anybody to sing is the one carefully constructed by those who insist on telling people they can't - threads like these produce examples of people who have been discouraged in this way every time they are started.
My musical education was, I would guess, typical of anybody who came from a working-class background - no practical teaching, just an introduction to LISTENING to music - we were trained to be 'audiences'. There was never any pretence that this was the objective - our lessons were called 'musical appreciation classes'.
Our 'singing' education, if it had any practical objective, was to produce possible recruits for the school choir;if you didn't measure up then you were told you would never make a singer and instructed to sit and listen while those who could did.
Beyond that, it was listening to the same half-dozen scratch old records.
The only other singing we encountered was at the school assembly at the beginning of the day, where it didn't matter if you sang in tune or not, nobody was really listening anyway.
Jim Carroll