.The idea of this group will be to explore folk music, traditional and contemporary, by singing, discussing and listening. There will be some emphasis on unaccompanied harmony singing and we will take time to teach and learn harmonies to some of the songs we enjoy. Typically of folk music we will not be using printed music so when we decide to learn a song we will learn the melody and harmonies by ear, but we will use printed copies of the words to some of the songs.

The group isn’t really about performing, either to each other or to outside groups. I’m not against doing that at some point, but performing involves a different set of skills which we’d have to think about before ‘going out’.

Apart from being involved in folk music for most of my adult life, I have also done a lot of singing with children and young adults, and I will be using some of that repertoire when appropriate. Above all, our singing sessions should be fun.

Having said all that, please note, I am not a music teacher, arguably not even a musician so my approach to teaching songs and harmonies will rather be the equivalent of ‘rough carpentry’, if you’re the musical equivalent of a ‘real’ carpenter, then you’d best stay away!!