I'm not up to speed on banjo to jam with other people yet. Because I'm fundamentally a fingerstyle guitar player I'm finding the right-hand styles quite tricky - had the banjo about 6 months. I'm basically learning tab from books and painstakingly teaching my right-hand NOT to do all the things it keeps wanting to do from years of guitar picking.

I don't often jam anyway - I used to play fiddle in a bluegrass/country band called Rod Stern & His Raging Fingers – but these days I predominantly play solo, and if I'm playing banjo in public I play songs rather than instrumentals. That's partly why I started asking about this book: I know there are lyrics that are associated with some of the pieces in this book, and I'd like to sing some of them, but I suspect I'd have to come up with [wholly] new tunes to fit them to Mr Datesman's arrangements. Not sure how I feel about that.

...as opposed to a lovely quirky tab arrangment of Rakes of Mallow I found in a 1960s Barry Kornfield book I bought from a charity shop a few months ago: it's always nice when you find a tune you really like and, through the marvels of the Internet, find it even has some hell-raising boisterous lyrics to go with it...