Hi

Wonderful to discover this long-running thread. Strange how so many people have the same kind of memories. The wooden speaker plugged into some kind of socket that ran to the headmasters's office. Two classes squeezed into one classroom, etc.

We grew up in an urban setting in South London and the lyrics were sometimes like a kind of cultural education. Places like Wales, Yorkshire, Scotland were like another universe. I remember things like Men of Harlech and Lisa Llan particularly.

At the time (in the sixties) I was also buying the Record Song Book which had the lyrics of chart music. I remember experiencing a conflict between the way I sang those songs, and the way we were expected to sing in "Singing Together". I guess there were kind of blue-note slurs in all the pop songs, whereas the "folk" songs as delivered by William Appleby were squarely on the notes.

The folk songs I later came to appreciate are usually spiced with ornamental lead-in notes and jumps (can't remember what to call them - in guitar playing I would call them hammers and pull-offs). The Singing Together style must have been somehow cleaned up or simplified - or was it because they weren't being sung by folk singers as such?