By 1994 at least 50% of the floor singers used crib sheets. The vibrancy was gone and the audience was made up largely of people who wanted to perform though the quality of performance had deteriorated greatly.

The sad thing is that you can run a very, very successful folk club that way - successful as in bums on seats and takings on the door (and at the bar).

I just have difficulty imagining standing up in front of people without having worked the song up, and even more difficulty imagining working a song up without memorising the words. I remember once I dried in the middle of reciting Pablo Neruda's wonderful poem "Tonight I can write" & had to get my cribsheet from my chair (fortunately I was sitting in the front row). Once I did Dylan's "No time to think" as a spoken piece with the words in my pocket; I think I sneaked the odd look, although I do know I skipped two verses. Those are my only experiences of using a crib. And once, on the spur of the moment, I did Nick Drake's "Which will", and dried beyond recovery after line 8 (of 16) - what a song to forget! That's my only experience of wishing I'd used a crib.

As for how to encourage people to sing off-book, I would hope that the spell-binding performances good singers can give would inspire people to emulate what they do. The frustration that's coming through in a lot of comments is with the type of folk club where good performances get lost in the noise - everybody gets a number, and everybody gets "a big hand" for having a go.