The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #157908 Message #3730677
Posted By: Jack Campin
16-Aug-15 - 07:06 AM
Thread Name: why do singers take so long to start?
Subject: RE: why do singers take so long to start?
As far as folk-singing in England goes, I think it only a slight exaggeration to say that every non-gentry male singer in rural parts, up until the mid twentieth century, learnt his craft in exactly the same way. From the late nineteenth century onwards, school singing lessons (using books) would have been a starting point for working class children everywhere.
There is a book about the social history of hymns in Victorian England which points out that they were THE mass literature of the time. Novelists like Dickens or populist poets like Tennyson came nowhere near the readership of a popular hymn writer. Their reach was far greater than the school system. And hymns always meant hymnbooks. It wasn't just recognized male "singers", it was the entire literate public of both sexes. (You didn't get delays in a service because the numbers were there for you, up on a board).
Anyway, there are already innumerable threads here about using written texts or not when singing. If I'd expected this thread to turn into yet another orgy of selfrighteousness by people who can't sing and read at the same time, I wouldn't have started it.
If you haven't yet learned how to work your use of a cribsheet into a fast-moving, slick act that conceals its considerable stagecraft, watch Les Barker in action.