"That's up to the club members."
Only if the club is the centre of your universe; some of us feel that the music and our responsibility for it extends far beyond that.
"Folk is becoming the new cool."
As I said, read the other threads, count your membership, compare the number of clubs with those of fifteen years ago, try getting a grant for a folk event or some research, take a peep at the EFDSS accounts, see how often folk music is presented fairly on television and radio - to quote the man "a person should try everything once, except incest and folk-music" or "the only thing you can do with a folk tune once you have played it is to play it again louder", or more recently "my idea of hell is to be locked in a folk club in Leeds (or somewhere" - can't lay my hands on the exact wording for any of these so I have paraphrased them).
Bryan
Throughout this thread I have referred to persistently bad singers; my first posting described this to be the case and the quote you just used was sent way up this column - otherwise I would have been advocating auditions, which I have most decidedly not been - if you missed my postings please give me the benefit of the doubt for a little intelligence (I think the phrase I used was 'one bite of the cherry').
If, as you claim, non-singers turning up for spots, mob-handedly or singly, is not something your club experiences, fine, couldn't be more delighted, but this means your advocating 'all you need is the will to sing' is academic as far as you are concerned and you are proposing that those of us who have experiences to the contrary should 'lie back and think of... wherever' is more than a little... what's the word I'm looking for.... smug maybe?
Personally, even if it had not happened in my presence on numerous occasions I would be a little disturbed to hear that it was a frequent occurrence elsewhere; persistent bad singing has contributed a great deal to the decline in the clubs and was being debated under the heading 'Crap begets crap' decades ago in the pages of Folk Review.
Sorry, putting singers on before they are ready to face an audience (or even advocating such a practice) is "if not championing, then certainly promoting bad singing" as far as I'm concerned.
As for your claim that "We do what we do and we find that it works" doesn't really apply to this argument as you haven't experienced the phenomenon that I, DeG and others have.
Jim Carroll