Easy Rider, in my experience song sessions are like hurricanes: in the northern hemisphere they rotate clockwise. I can't speak for those who live on the bottom half of the world: they may need to go counter-clockwise just to screw themselves to the planet, so they won't drop off.

I regularly attend four sessions: Monday nights are practice times for the Once-Born Gospel Singers (aka The Poodle-ears). The only thing that goes clockwise there are the instrumental breaks. Charlie usually directs the practice, but other people suggest songs from time to time, or bring xerox copies of new ones. We tend to practice a set/gig list of about a dozen songs--adding to or subtracting from the list as we feel a need, or as we discover that one of the songs just introduced or revived sounds good enough to add in place of something which didn't go over in our last gig or of which we are just growing tired.

On Thursday nights, when I don't go to hear the SOBs at Quinn's Lighthouse, I go to a bluegrass/folk jam at the Fifth String. The circle usually includes half a dozen to a dozen players, and song choice goes around the circle clockwise. Each person in turn chooses a song, plays the first break and decides the nature of breaks--whether verse, chorus, verse/chorus, AABB, or just a turnaround. All players who want to take breaks, again going clockwise, and the chooser takes the last break (the chooser also decides when the breaks will be if it's a song, whether there will be just one break between verses or more. The players' abilities vary greatly, usually including some professional level players. I have never heard anyone talking during a performance.

On Sunday nights I go to The Starry Plough, an Irish pub. A circle of musicians, many of them wonderful, plays jigs and reels and hornpipes--all instrumental. Every 45 minutes or so, the circle takes a break and a leader calls on people who have indicated they would like to solo. While people talk during the instrumental session, every one is wonderfully quiet during the solos. Yesterday was the San Francisco Sea Fest (or whatever it's called) and many of the musicians who had performed there came to the Plough and did solos (a wonderful quality of performances last night--as there almost always is). I was the last soloist of the evening and I made a bad song choice--the song isn't bad: it was "Free Grace," a spiritual from the Georgia Sea Island Singers. It was a bad choice because with my group I never lead it: I sing bass, with a somewhat different rhythmic pattern than the rest of the singers, and last night was my first attempt to sing lead on the song, and I was occasionally blowing the rhythm of the chorus (on which the bass part comes in early). But the audience was still great, they sang along on the choruse no matter how much I confused them, and gave me warm applause.

The last is the monthly Berkeley Fiddlin' and Pickin' potlucks--here, forty or fifty musicians break up into a variety of groups, most of which follow the clockwise direction, although I once sat in an RUS session in which one woman chose half the songs and another woman chose most of the rest--for the first woman to lead (the BPF&P RUS circles are not always like that). And even here, in all the different groups I've played and sang with, everyone was always polite and always followed the unspoken session rules.

But then I haven't played in that many bars...

--seed