"how many songs can you do it with?"
I stopped singing regularly around 20 years ago and within the last couple of years I decided to re-start as the opportunity has now presented itself
At the height of my singing I had a repertoire of 300 plus songs and a basic repertoire of about 50 which I could pull together after a quick couple of sing-throughs - the rest took a little more work.
Those I never got to sing regularly (say once every year), I virtually had to re-learn each time, but I found they came back easily enough.
When I restarted, I found I had all but forgotten most of them, so I made myself a working repertoire of around twenty, which I worked up ober a couple of months, kept them as stand-bys and set to work on the rest - I'm now back to around 100 from my old repertoire and have added about a dozen new ones which I found I half knew from listening to others sing them on albums or way back in the clubs.
I have a test piece yet to tackle, a superb, longing Irish version of Banks of Newfoundland which I have only heard sung a couple of times - the acid test.
My short-term memory is not of the best, but my long term ability to recall seems to have shortened considerably.....now where was I?
I was still going to see MacColl whenever he sang, right up to the point where he stopped singing altogether.
Uncharacteristically, he had begun to forget words, but whenever he did he managed to bluff convincingly.
When we asked him about this, he said that the secret was to learn the song then learn the story of the song so you could re-tell it in prose, while using some of the verse lines interspersed - this could be done while you were not actually working on the song - in the car or around the house.
There were all sorts of other tricks, the favourite being to sing a song you wanted to sing publicly at double speed.
I don't believe there is any set method, it's just a matter of finding out what works best for you.
The Singers Club committee asked the main residents not to repeat a song over a set period (depending on the size of their repertoire - sort of like a golf handicap I'm tole (hate the game)
Jim Carroll