Ten thousand years ago I found and purchased a copy of Song Fest: 300 Songs—Words and Music edited by Dick and Beth Best. Originally published around 1937, I wore out three or four copies of the thing because it was a great resource for folk songs, college songs, camp songs, you name it. My present copy (still in reasonable good shape) was purchased in 1962. Paperback with a bright yellow cover. If you run across it in a used bookstore or St. Vinnie's or the Salvation Army store, grab it!!

Anyway, browsing the prefaces to the various editions, it becomes clear that the intent of the compilers of this collection was that people use the book to learn the songs. Commit them to memory. Do not sit around in a group with everybody's nose in it as if it were a hymnal!! In fact, the preface to the first edition concludes with the following:

A reward of one left-handed dungaree patch, guaranteed not to rip, run, rust, tear, split, melt, break, etc., is hereby offered for the pelt of the first bohunk caught surreptitiously using this book at a songfest.

Methinks the same reward, or the equivalent, should be offered as a bounty on anyone caught using RUV, The Folk Singer's Wordbook, or any other such inhibitor of the folk process at a song circle or other songfest. Learn the bleedin' songs!

The procedure the Seattle Song Circle used when it began in June of 1977 was to start out with a few sea chanteys to get things warmed up. Then we'd go around, literally, in a circle (the chairs were set up that way). When your turn came up, you had three options: 1) you could sing; 2) you could pass; 3) you could request a song from someone else in the circle. If you chose to sing, you could do a solo, lead a song, or teach a song to the group. This way, there was a nice variety of solo and group songs, and at the end of the evening, lots of people would be talking to each other and exchanging words to songs. It was a real cross-fertilization process, and like Mudcat (if the group is large enough), if you were looking for a particular song, you would often find someone who knew it or could tell you where to find it. It was great! My wife and I went every Sunday evening for several years.

Because of other demands on our time, Barbara and I had to drop out for awhile. When we returned, we found that the group had changed. Many of the same people were there, but there were a lot of new people. People still went round in a circle, but rather than the previous procedure, we spent a lot of time suffering along with someone who had come in carrying a huge armload of books, and when their tune came along, they would say, "I just discovered this song this afternoon, and I don't know the words yet and I'm not sure how the tune goes, but I wanna sing it anyway—." Then we'd all have to sit there for the next ten or fifteen minutes and try to be kind and supportive while the person sat there trying to sing with his or her face buried in some songbook, groping, struggling, flubbing, and restarting verses when they goofed. This sort of thing happened several times an evening, interspersed with people who wanted everybody to take out their copy of RUS and all sing the same song together. Frankly, to us, it had lost all its appeal. We stopped coming.

A song circle can be a great resource for learning songs, and encountering songs you've not heard before and might want to learn. It's a great opportunity to try your performing skills before a sympathetic audience. It's also a great opportunity to encourage other people to learn songs (i.e., memorize them) and sing them. To me, sitting around group-singing out of a songbook locks the folk process, confining you to the songbook version, it kills any attempt at individual handling of a song, it stifles creativity, and is, all in all, a crushing bore. Don't know how song circle is now. Maybe we should give it another try.

Learn a song, then put the bloody book aside, and stand there with your bare face hanging out, and sing it.

Don Firth