A whole bunch of people sitting around singing out of the same book? I've never come across that (apart from hymn books). We used to do it at school when I was a kid of course, and it killed the songs. I was rooting through the attic and I found one of the old songs books - and there were some great songs in it too. But that didn't help.

You can get all the beautiful and powerful harmonies you like in a chorus, and you don't need the word in front of you to join in, not by the time you've heard it a few times anyway by the last verse. And the harmonies are there by instinct with every bunch of folkies I've ever come across. It may be we're more used to that kind of thing in the Old World.