I haven't noticed this "ownership" phenomenon much at the song circles and jams around Portland and Seattle-- at least not in the sense that folks get irate if you sing "their song." I have found though, much to my chagrin, that in one of the rather structured song circles, the GROUP seems to have developed a set way of doing certain songs. When one of those songs is one of my special songs (i.e., I like the song a lot and I think I do it well) and my arrangement is different from the way the group usually does it, I find it very frustrating when the group does not seem open to doing the song a bit faster or slower (or with a stronger back beat or some other modification) than they usually do it. I can still sing the song (everyone sings every song), but I can't do it the way I prefer without being, in effect, told that my "timing is strange" or that I'm "doing it too fast," or whatever.

Beyond a song 'belonging' to a given person, where did we get this silly notion that there's only one right way to do a song?

Don F. - Wonderful stories, wonderful examples!
I like that attitude: "The only way you [can] wind up "owning" a song [is] to sing it so well that nobody else [wants] to suffer by comparison.


Nutty, Jeri, and others, I'm generally with you--when it comes to MOST songs in my repertoire.   If a song is your specialty and just another song to me, I'll gladly leave the field for that song open for you. But there are a handful of songs that I've really put a lot of effort into learning, arranging, polishing, etc., and that I consider my best show pieces. I'm not about to forego EVER doing them in a given setting just because someone else does them there, too.
Jeri, as you pointed out, doing the song WITH each other seems one positive way to deal with the 'ownership' issue. (I'm a damn fine back-up singer/harmonizer!)

(Russ, I agree about the [written or unwritten] rules of small, informal groups, but if a group had too many restrictive rules, I probably wouldn't sing with them a lot.)

(Micca, I, too, find it easier to forget my own songs' words than those of other people's songs--from the myriad alternative lyrics that passed through my mind before I zeroed in on just the right ones!)
         
Don, " If the club is open to outsiders/visitors then they must expect that there will be occassions when the same song that they've heard before by one of their members will crop up at the hands of a visitor." Well said.

I can't imagine not being willing to share lyrics, tabs, arrangements, etc. with others who ask - no matter how much work I've put into a piece -- with one exception. I once had a war of wills with a boyfriend who wanted to sing a song I had written. Problem with that was that this was a funny song that sort of had a punch line (in addition to other funny liners), so I knew its BIGGEST impact would be the FIRST time a person heard it. If he were to have sung the song about town, he would have been skimming off my laughs, as it were, before folks heard me do my own song. Since I didn't do a lot of performing back then, I didn't want the impact of my best song diluted. But this kind of song is, I think, a special case.   Most songs actualy grow on you, so that audiences may receive them better if they've heard the songs before.


Genie