One of the very good things about the way Seattle Song Circle used to work was that it encouraged people to learn the songs before they came to the meetings, so that when their turn came up, they would have something to contribute—preferably a song that the rest of the crew had never heard, if at all possible. The result was that a lot of really good songs began to emerge.

I addition to that, and of no small importance, was that a lot of people took their first fliers at singing solo in front of that group. Generally too shy in most circumstances, but since this was a warm plunge, many gave it a shot. Once they got a taste, they beavered away at learning songs and developed into pretty good solo singers.

There would be an army of small battery-operated cassette recorders whirring softly away. One of these belong to Sally Ashford. One evening she showed up with a stack of song books that she had put together, made up of songs she'd recorded on those Sunday evenings. She had copied down the words to several dozen songs, possibly as many as a hundred or more—and had written out the tunes (standard notation on manuscript paper—the dreaded dots)! She ran the original song sheets, with the tune at the top and the words typed below, through a copy machine, then put them into inexpensive three-ring binders, and sold them to anyone who wanted them (almost everybody) for a couple of bucks, essentially what it had cost her—not counting the many hours of painstaking listening and copying she must have put in on the project. A labor of love on Sally's part and much appreciated by the whole group.

But as was intended, we learned the songs we wanted out of the book, and then left it at home, as Sally had intended.

Thaïs. I had heard Walt Robertson sing it a number of times in the early 1950s. Then, in 1955 or so, I spotted The New Song Fest in a book store, riffled through it for about three seconds, then ran squealing and giggling up to the cash register. There were lots of "AHAs!" in that book, songs I had heard Walt or others sing, but didn't know what records or song books I could find them in. One of them was Thaïs. It turned out that that's where Walt had learned it. I learned it also, along with a whole batch of other songs I'd been looking for.

When Barbara and I got season tickets to Seattle Opera, the first opera I saw was Jules Massenet's Thaïs. Yup. The song takes a two and a half hour opera and boils it down to about three minutes!

Don Firth