Hope you don't mind me raising a point not directly connected to your appeal Will -
'Head voice'.
I have to say I've always found it somewhat of a culture shock to be talking to a woman with a strong, resonant and quite often very attractive speaking voice who then stands up and sings with an air-filled, almost ethereal tone - occasionally fine, but when constantly used - frankly boring and certainly, very limiting.
Personal preferences aside, the production of head tone involves two major problems:
The fact that it takes a great deal of breath to produce this tone often leads to problems with singing long-line songs - having to take a breath in the line where the text doesn't require it - just the opposite.
A few years I heard a very breathy singer singing Barbara Allen - I counted the singer having to take three breaths per line throughout the song.
If this tone is chosen, the singer needs to plan their breathing carefully - snatch-breaths are useful, relaxation, particularly dropping the shoulders, is a good way of being economical with your air supply as well.
The second problem - 'gear-change' for the want of a better term, is more difficult to handle.
Many women (not a problem with male singers usually) using the tone encounter this while rising up or down a tune - arriving at a point where the tone cannot be maintained and the singer is forced to move from head to chest tone - a sort of tonal quantum-leap, which has an adverse affect on the song (unless you are setting out to sound like a Swiss Yodeller).
I've heard Peggy Seeger talk about this at length - she uses both head and chest tone for different songs but she worked bloody hard to solve the problems; I know from The Critics Group that other women singers have done a fair amount of work on this.
Wonder if anybody else has come across these problems and found solutions?
Made a start on assembling a user-pack from some of our archive recordings, as mentioned above - I'd forgotten how useful some of them are.
It shouldn't be too much of a problem to complete when I can find where everything is.
When completed, I can send MP3 sound files to anybody interested if they let me have an e-mail address.
Jim Carroll