Couldn't resist this thread as I update my PalmPilot for Pinewoods Folk Music Week ;-). I started a FileMaker database back around 1991 as an index to a shelf of looseleaf notebooks that was getting out of hand. The current version is a master lyric DB of 1275 songs (as of this instant), linked to around 20 individual set lists with an additional several hundred titles, so that I can quickly add new songs and check to see if I've already got the lyrics. Over the years I've geeked it up with maintenance macros (duplicate check, spell check with custom dictionary, Need Lyrics search and sort), page layouts, custom songbook-merge templates in Word, and most recently a link to the most recent export of my iTunes XML file (3718 songs, 39.1 days, 22.7 GB).

Ah, you say, but how many of those can you actually SING? From memory? Probably 400-600 at any given time. Some recent metrics:
* at Old Songs 2004, I and my duo partner Ken Mattsson sang for nine hours straight with Jim Pfau and Denise Kania, repeating only 3 songs (and yes, that was one song after another, not workshop-circle style, though we were pulling from 4 people's reps)
*My ex-husband and I used to play "Song Geography" in the car: one would sing a song with a place name, the other had to sing a song with a place name that had the LAST letter of the first song's place name (any place name was fair game)--we did this for a 2-hour drive each way once a week
* On an all-night drive from central Saskatchewan to Calgary, I kept myself awake from midnight to 7 am by singing anything I could remember, no repeats allowed
* Gloucester Hornpipe & Clog Society performs from a repertoire of 75 songs and 100 tunes
* our monthly whisky and singing circle, the Single Malt and Song Society, has a songbook of 110 songs, almost all of which I can sing from memory at 3 am not sober
* every year I dust off all 42 verses of Tam Lin at midnight on Hallowe'en, no cheat sheet

Sounds like I'm boasting here, but actually it's kind of fun to tally it up. I've always suffered from Velcro brain, and it's a treat to meet a new friend that can sing me under the table with something I've never heard. David Parry was famous for that--at the dog-end of an all-night sing, while the rest of us mumbled through Bright Morning Stars Are Rising, he could pull out The Cruise of the Bigler word-perfect and at speed, and not on his first pint either.

Boy, do I know the "song trigger" phenomenon! The inside of my head has a sound track. What's often amusing is that the trigger will be subconscious, for example a street sign, that I won't notice but that will set off a tune in my head. By the time the words surface, I'm into the second or third verse and wonder why I'm humming "Fennario," because somewhere back there I saw a turn to Peggy Lane.

I do notice I'm slipping as I cross the mid-latitudes (coming up on 45 degrees, heading south...) It does take more conscious effort than it used to. But the brain is a curious thing for storing songs. They do fall in one ear and out the other...

Lynn Noel
www.lynnoel.com