Perhaps I am growing critical in my old age, but it seems to me that there was a warmer and more cordial feeling about our audiences [at the Waterloo Rooms, Glasgow] than there is now. For one thing, the artistes were not such strangers. They did not come to show off their wonderful voices so much as to give pleasure to their hearers. Perhaps we were more emotional and not so intellectual, but we knew the singers and knew their songs. We liked the songs we knew, and always a great cheer went up when a singer announced as an encore one of the popular ballads that we all used to sing at our smaller socials. In my early days very few of us could sing from music. We were not readers. We learnt our songs by heart from hearing other folk sing them. << less