"But, but, but, according to Jim, if you don't learn your stuff and sing or play it from memory, you're showing contempt for the music"
Not exactly what I was saying - I am saying if you don't take it beyond just reading it off the page and take the trouble to learn it is showing a contempt both for the songs (not a musician, so I am not commenting on instrumental music).
The songs I know as folk are not just a set of words, but a representation of experiences and emotions set into a verse form with a tune added.
The fact that they were made and proliferated by a section of our population who are not recognised to any great extent as creative artists, gives the songs as a whole a social importance - they are, as the monumental series of albums says, 'The Voice of the People'.
We spent decades talking to old singers who were quite articulate in discussing what the songs meant to them and their contemporaries.
I expect to come away from a song with some understanding of what it meant to the singer, what he or she felt about it, how they related to it..... and a whole lot of other aspects of the making of the song and the journey is has made, through both space and time.
I very seldom, if ever, get that from someone who gets up and reads it from a crib-sheet, a tablet or a mobile phone - they at least should have gone to the trouble of learning the words and the tune and absorbing the song in order to make it their own - I can probably get the words and tunes from a book.
As I said, having memory aide-memoir is not what concerns me - we've all possibly had to do that from time to time.
Age really isn't an excuse for not knowing the words - we have just been recording a 95 year old who has given us some of the longest versions of traditional ballads I've heard, without too much trouble in remembering them, though he hasn't sung some of them for half a century.
As the roadworker said in reply to the lady who asked how she could get to Carnegie Hall - "Work lady, work".   
Jim Carroll