Folk music shouldn't be about your own self-esteem, or your confidence, or even because you just want to sing. It should be about communicating good music to a willing audience.

At a folk club I no longer go to, the most entertaining of the regulars only ever sang from sheets. His genre was verbally intricate Victorian music hall. He could communicate them brilliantly, but rarely did the same one twice. Memorizing them wouldn't have made any sense. The whole point of his act was that it was a window into a multifarious culture of the distant past.


If you can't do that you're not ready to perform in public.

This guy certainly was. Can YOU do that? Pick up something with a long, tricky, chromatic tune, wacky rhythm and complicated internal rhymes, and do it fluidly carrying off all the original jokes?


Folk clubs can still offer you plenty of opportunity to sing, but standing up to face an audience when you're not ready to do so is sheer self-indulgence.

The reason I don't go to that club any more is because it got very, very boring with the same word-perfect renditions of rather uninteresting 1980s singer-songwriter stuff. The people who did it never made a mistake. It was exactly the same the tenth time round. If that's what turns you on, maybe you ought to find a venue that makes accountancy a spectator sport.

I'd far rather listen to someone like Dennis the Elder doing his best to get across something that means something to him than patronize a venue that would try to silence him.

(Must try turning up at a singaround with my favourite book sometime - all four volumes of Bronson. Though there is probably somebody local who could trump that by bringing the whole Greig-Duncan).