Love this thread. I have no problem for people who want to use Rise Up Squinting to learn words. I think a compromise might be a singer who uses large print to remember a word or two they get stuck on. But to keep your nose in Rise Up Squinting is in my view somewhat antisocial. It keeps your eyes in the wrong place. To use it to remember chords is equally a distraction. Why shouldn't one memorize the chords as well as the melody or the lyrics?

I got back into teaching groups for this very reason. We run a class of beginning folk music and encourage people to bring tape recorders so they can learn the tunes at home. We pass out lyric sheets but put 'em away while they're singing in the class. Instead of chord sheets, we try to get 'em to memorize the progressions by using the numeral system. (So-called Nashville numbering but it didn't originate in Nashville, musicians have been using it for years). To my way of thinking, church hymnals are a bane. In my day (grumpy old man) folks learned the lyrics by heart and we liked it!

But I confess to having to use a cheat sheet when trying to sing songs in different languages for a specific gig. It's a cop out but it helps me keep working.

What is needed and what we try to address in our clases is how to learn a song lyric and accompany it on a respective instrument. It's not all that easy to learn lyrics by heart but there are proscribed ways of doing it involving some homework.

1. Repeat the line of each stanza to be learned at least twenty times.
2. Connect each line of the stanza with singing the last word or two of the first line and the first word or two of the next line at least twenty times. Do this with every line.
3.   Learn the chord progression of the song by heart so that you can play it without having to hear the melody. This allows more advanced musicians to improvise over the chords.

In short, the more people that can learn to sing together and make music without printed material, the better in my opinion.

Frank Hamilton