Nor do I like cutesy, audience-participation, hand-flippin' songs. At my weekly song circle, there are usually only 10-15 people who routinely attend, although on occasion it swells to 20 or so. Some of us have old standards that we associate with those people, others of us have a large repertoire of songs written by certain artists (Goodman, Newman, Prine, Silverstein or Staines, for instance) that we urge them to sing, some of us write songs we want to share, others of us sing long ballads with long involved stories, others do a duet they've been practicing, others teach a new shanty or group sing we all get into or sometimes we get into a theme like violence and death and grief in which case I sometimes say, OK, in this next round each of us has to sing the happiest song we know! From time to time we do a couple of fiddle tunes and burn off some of the energy. It's always different and always satisfying.

RUS to me is very limiting, its main value that of reminding one of an almost forgotten song, then is to be laid down again. I was- briefly- in a group that, each in turn, flipped through its pages, said, Oh, here is one! They would sing it, with no regard for effect then the next flippin' person would say, Oh, here's one! etc and etc and etc, as the man said.