Guest,
I began collecting in the early seventies while we were involved in running a club in West London and a singers workshop.
While I was still residenting at the club I found my time being taken up more and more with research and having less time to practice my songs. I found my singing gradually going down the pan because I wasn't putting in the time to get my songs ready for performance. I am not a 'natural' singer; I need to work to make my songs come out right. When I was singing regularly I had a repertoire of around 350 songs, which grandually rusted to a standstill. My range began to decrease and my voice became less flexible - I stopped enjoying it, and I believe that if the singer doesn't enjoy it, neither does the audience.
My standards aren't paricularly 'exacting'; I expected other people's singing not to fall below a not particularly high standard so I couldn't expect to get away with not doing the work myself.
I still enjoy singing the occasional song in sessions over here, but I tend to fall back on the handful I feel I can do passably well.
Cap'n; I do wish that people would get The Singers Club policy right.
Nobody 'had' to sing songs forom their own birthplace - MacColl was born in Salford and sang mainly Scots songs. All the rest of the residents sang a varied repertoire of songs, mainly from Ireland, Scotland and England. Bert Lloyd, who was a Singers Club resident for many years quite often sang songs from the Canadian repertoire (often taken from the Fowke collection). What none of the residents did was to sing in accents that weren't their own, or at the very least, familiar to them (eg Maccoll's Scots accent, which he grew up with and surrounded by at home).
The tendency (that's what it was) to sing songs from your own national background, was suggested in the early days of The Singers Club and came into being as a reaction against the proliferation of pseudo-American accents which were beginning to dominate the revival. The end result I believe was a blossoming of the national repertoires of Britain and Ireland.
The belief that The Singers Club was a draconianly run setup is a false one; the policies that were in place there were adopted by the residents, for the residents.
Liz;
I'll drink to that! It used to pee me off to see singers turn up for a booking and sit down in the bar till it was their turn to sing, then go back down there when they had sung (or chat loudly to their mates while the other singers were performing). - Prats
Jim Carroll