Being able to read music opens up the whole field to you.

If your only way to learn tunes is to hear someone else sing them, you can get stuck in the trap of thinking that you have to sing them the way they do. But if you find the song in a book, you can work out your own interpretation of it rather than slavishly following someone else's.

There is one prominent folk singer who has been at it all her life, can read music, and who has had access to a great amount of material, both printed and on recordings. She says, in the introduction to a song book, that when she learns a song or ballad, she gets together just about every version of it that she can find, both records and books. She learns as much as she can about the background of the song, studies the various versions of it, and in the end, what she comes up with is usually a composite of several versions of the song.

Knowing how to read music is no more limiting that learning how to read any written material. John Gielgud, Lawrence Olivier, Kenneth Brannagh, and (ahem!) Mel Gibson all have quite different interpretations and readings, all valid, of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and they're all reading from the same text.

Reading music is a tool. And when you have the words and tune down, from then on, it all depends on how skillfully and creatively you go from there.

Don Firth