Interesting thread - but then again, aren't they all?

With respect of Pip's comments above - I wonder, how deliberate are we floor-singers in general about what songs we sing where? I keep a wee black book in which I detail just that, with the intention of trying not to repeat myself in any one place, but then again to form a relationship with a song you need to keep singing it. Earlier today I recorded a new version of the ballad of King Orfeo which I've been singing now since 1982. It evolves with me, forever suggesting different approaches. Today, I accompanied myself on a large Nepalese singing-bowl by way of a drone (although I couldn't imagine myself doing that in a singaround somehow); tomorrow, if I still like the recording, it goes up on my Myspace page.

At a singaround last Wednesday (The Beech in Chorlton, where Pip sang a languidly sublime Little Musgrave* which I hope to hear again one day) I eschewed both of the songs I'd rehearsed earlier in the day** in favour of ones I wasn't on top of at all, but which seemed more relevant to emergent themes. One of these was Seeds of Love - which I've never heard anyone else sing for years, if at all; the other was Robert Burns' Winter - A Dirge - which I've never heard anyone else do period. So much for the oral tradition, assuming it still has currency with respect of those songs we think of as being somehow traditional, and assuming ever existed in the first place other than a fantasy construct for academics to ponder over. But that, as they say, is another story - The Theory of the Oral Tradition...

* Allowing for my failing memory, he might have sang something else altogether, but either way languid / sublime.

** Come Write Me Down & Child #32, if you must know.