Hi dwditty, what a stink this is gonna cause. I know some people feel strongly about this book both pro & con. I wouldn't buy it for kindling. The book itself isn't so bad as the way it's been used at singing sessions. I recently got an e-mail from some friends from England who had seen a posting of mine in the rec.music.folk news group. I mentioned nothing about RUS. In the news group reply they referred to a lot of the singing sessions they had been to, while touring the East Coast, as RUS sessions, an American phenomenon.
On the pro side it has a great many songs with a little blurb on each, on the con side the blurbs may not be quite correct, the songs may only pieces of versions & there may be a large amount of songs that stretch the realm of folkdom (although I'm not sure if they claim it to be a folk or a fake song book), most of the material can easily be found elsewhere. It does get to a common denominator, though, for those that need a starting point for singing in groups. My big beef is that it's then (forgive me, not in all cases) used as a bible by those that don't have or won't find more resources & get stuck in the RUS rut. After attending some of what was referred to as RUS sessions & hearing that other sessions have gone the same route & how the fun & life had been sucked out of these sessions I wrote this following song (after the copy of the e-mail sent to me, names have been deleted). God forgive me. Barry

Hi, Seeing your thread on singarounds reminded to tell you that we are coming back to fair Boston next May. With a bit of luck we can get together again. I didn't want to say out in the open, BTW, but the worst of the Rise Up Singarounds that we have been to was in Boston!

Quite a few gigs so far, but oddly nothing in Boston yet. If we're free on the appropriate night we'd love to come back and join in your session.

Cheers,

RISE UP SCREAMING (words by Barry Finn)
Tune: Jack In The Green, Traditional

A pub session or a party is a very strange thing
They're all out of fashion no more do they sing
For they read from a book or copy a tape
They imitate sounds no mortal should make

There's no sound in the kitchen, no sound in the hall
There's a murderous screech that plays off the walls
Where is the music, where are the songs
In the mouths of monsters where no sound belongs

Dead pan they look as they sing in your face
They'll spit out the words and the tunes they'll disgrace
A song will be beat o'er and over to death
And in a round robin they'll resurrect it again

No more will be heard a version that's lost
Or a variant that's rare or two songs that were crossed
The borrowing or sharing of a tune or a song
Will be according to the Bible all else will be wrong

And now for the future, it's bleak for the song
No young mortal will dare to carry it on
They'll be none around who without books can sing
Or swap without tapes or rise up singing

Copyright Barry 1996

Sorry, dwditty, you probably weren't looking for something like this but when I'm told to sing in a soft voice or that's not how it goes (because it's not written like that in RUS) or do it in the same key as it was written so we can all play along the right way or everybody turn to page such & such & not one will sing a song that's not in this book, I have to scream. This is not one isolated session, this is what I also hear about in other places in the US. Hope this helped a little but I'm thinking it didn't do much. Barry

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Note: "Jack in the Green" was written by Martin Graebe.
-Joe Offer, 16 Dec 2001-