Some time ago I went to a club in a small town twelve or so miles from my home. I was somewhat perplexed when the MC handed out song-books to the attendees, and then spent the evening telling them which songs they were going to sing, and leading the community singing.

That's the American "Rise Up Singing" model. Somebody here has had a certain amount of input into it...

There is something like it for instrumental tunes in Edinburgh, where an educational organization, and one of its members off his own bat, have been assembling books of accessible tunes for about 30 years. This has had a few unanticipated consequences, mostly negative.

- the repertoire gets standardized and accumulates in bulk over the decades to a point where somebody new to the scene (whether from another place or another generation) will get intimidated out of participating. It makes the scene much more cohort-based than the Irish setup where everybody takes O'Neill as the bible and nothing ever gets formally added to it. What looks like a move to flexibility turns out to create increased rigidity.

- one session has coped by making a selection that they have pretty much memorized, but they are VERY resistant to anyone suggesting they play anything else.

- another session has decided to take the whole lot on, but that means spreading a truckload of paper out on the pub tables before they start and it takes longer for them to find a suggested tune than it does to play it.

- a separate group has made less use of paper and rarely plays from it, but the memorized material is not merely a rigid tune list, each tune is only played in one fixed set. If you have your own idea about what tune might go with another, go try it somewhere else.

Tunebooks have their place, but I wish trad music organizations would produce them on thermal printers so they'd fade to white in six months.