06/13/2026
As this sing continues to grow, I want to talk about “hey, how do I do this, anyway?” Especially when maybe the last time many people sang in public as part of unaccompanied group was maybe at a campfire, or back in elementary school sometime.
One part of how we do this is certainly the repertoire. There are tons of songs out there that have passed the test of time, and Just Plain Work when sung - but a lot of people don’t know these songs anymore.
So how does one find all these songs? And how do you go about learning them? That’s what I’d like to help everyone answer in the next month or two. So stay tuned!
For now, let me just say that the simplest answer, and the best, that I’ve found is one song at a time. Here are the steps:
1. Find a song that you like
2. Make sure it works for a group of people that would love to join in and sing with you
3. Keep singing that song over and over and over again, - in the car, in the shower, while you’re doing dishes - until you can easily sing it by memory.
4. Congratulations! You now have The One Song that you can lead!
5. Keep leading it! You might mess it up a couple of times in front of a group, but don’t worry. It’s your song now. It’ll come back to you.
I’ll keep on coming back to this idea, along with other thoughts and tips that I’ve found helpful. For now, may I present… (drumroll please) my very first song that I learned well enough to lead! It’s a sea shanty of sorts that I first came across as covered by the Pogues*, so now you might also have a new group to check out, if you haven’t heard of them already.
For those of you reading along who have also been doing this for a while, what was your first song that you knew well enough to lead? Let me know in the comments, and we’ll get a whole playlist together, how about?
Provided to YouTube by RhinoGreenland Whale Fisheries · The Pogue...
