I have just contributed to a thread in which a person (wholly anonymous, so I don't have to worry about offending anyone) asked for suggestions of songs to sing at a session on New Year's Day.

Now if that means 'suggestions of songs they already know which they hadn't realized were appropriate for NYD' then I don't have any problem. But I have an uneasy feeling that they probably mean 'suggestions of songs they don't know'. And therein lies the nub.

The request was sent out on Boxing Day, leaving, even with immediate feedback, a maximum of five and a half days to learn it (possibly THEM) - realistically far less. Is that enough time to learn a song?

I accept it is enough time to learn the words. I accept it is enough time to learn the tune. But what I don't accept is that knowing the words and the tune is the same as knowing the song. Six days does not give you the time to become comfortable with a song, to knock off its rough edges, to know its ins and out, to understand what it really means, to enable it, when you sing it, to flow out without thinking at all - certainly not with the sole thought being 'Shit! What's the next line?'

I think a really good question for Mudcat on Boxing Day might be 'Can anyone suggest songs to sing at Whitsun?'

[To save anyone else pointing out the Bleeding Obvious I will say myself:
1) Yes, if you want to write a song about a contemporary event you'll have to do your best immediately; there's no point in producing a parody of the Laughing Policeman about Plebs Mitchell and then incubating it till Easter. You'll have to do your best. But I'm really talking about serious folk songs that deserve a decent, appropriate, unstuttering, intelligent performance.
2) Yes, I know that Sarah Ogan Gunning as a child had the ability to reproduce a song perfectly after one hearing, in the same way that as a student Sigmund Freud had the ability to memorise whole pages of medical textbooks at a single glance. They both lost the ability pretty soon: so don't rely on it!]