As part of my hunt for sources of the words and music that I want to use for Singsational Nottingham!, I was looking at the intoduction page in the Daily Express Songbook at the weekend and I noticed that they talk about massive community singing events which had thousands of participants! I think at this stage I’d settle for a few hundred, but it makes you wonder what could be possible.
I thought a bit more about using the old community song books too. There is this one and the News Chronicle equivalent is also quite common, but I believe there were probably quite a lot of other ones. For instance, I have a Scottish University Students Song Book on the shelf (and that sounds quite esoteric to me, so it makes me wonder what else must be out there).
I did wonder if we should offer a discount off the ticket price for people who bring an old-style community song book with them, but then I looked at the words of some of the songs and I decided they were rather too politically incorrect to allowed out in todays world!
However, a number of songs that we will use at Singsational Nottingham! are in one of the two main community song books (My bonnie; Ilkley Moor etc.), so it is good to know that we are literally keeping the tradition they represent going.
Singsation! 