Dick Greenhaus posted:

'In pre-publication days, I'd guess that most folks who sang knew, maybe, a dozen or so songs. How many do you know?'

I'm not sure I agree with you, Dick. If you're saying that, in pre-publication days, singers didn't learn more than a dozen songs, I don't think that's true. When James "Brasser" Copper wrote down all the family songs that he knew, there were many more than a few dozen.

Some singers only learn a few songs, others have a large number. I don't think the form of the original matters - if you want to learn a song, you learn it.

I think you're on stronger ground if you say that most singers don't sing more than a dozen songs. I know many songs which I sing to myself, but I can't do them justice in performance.

In my active days singing and running a folk club (1970s), I wrote a repertoire list. These were only the songs that I could stand up and sing without notebook or rehearsal. The list ran to over 200 songs. The majority had been learned from records or books, but there were 20 or so from family and other singers.

Wherever the songs came from, I usually wrote the words down to learn them. I still have some of the postcards and scraps of paper that I carried around for the few days it took to commit them to memory.

I really don't sing in public now, but I think I probably still have half that list in memory. Plus at least 30 male voice choir pieces and most of the male solos from the Gilbert & Sullivan operas. My party piece (which I was not often allowed to perform) was a solo rendition of the whole of 'Trial by Jury'.

Phil