ression.

Sometimes a whole line maun be changed so as to get the right sort o'
sound. It makes all the difference in the world if I can sing a long
"oh" sound, sometimes, instead o' a clippit e or a short a. To be able
to stand still, wi' ma moth open, big enow for a bird to fly in, will
mak' an audience laugh o' itself.

Anyway, it's so I do wi' a new song. I'll ha' sung it maybe twa-three
thousand times before ever I call it ready to try wi' an audience. And
even then I'm just beginning to work on it. Until I know how the folk
in front tak' it I can't be sure. It may strike them in a way quite
different from my idea o' hoo it would. Then it may be I'll ha' to
change ma business. My audiences always collaborate wi' me in my new
songs--and in my old ones, too, bless 'em. Only they don't know it,
and they don't realize how I'm cheating them by making them pay to
hear me and then do a deal o' my work for me as well.

It's a great trick to get an audience to singing a chorus wi' ye. Not
in Britain--it's no difficult there, or in a colony where there are
many Britons in the hoose. But in America I must ha' been one o' the
first to get an audience to singing. American audiences are the
friendliest in the world, and the most liberal wi' applause ye could
want to find. But they've always been a bit shy aboot singin' wi ye.
They feel it's for ye to do that by yer lane.

But I've won them aroond noo, and they help me more than they ken.
Ye'll see that when yer audience is singing wi' ye ye get a rare idea
of hoo they tak' yer song. Sometimes, o' coorse, a song will be richt
frae the first time I sing it on the stage; whiles it'll be a week or
a month or mair before it suits me. There's nae end to the work if
ye'd keep friends wi' those who come oot to hear ye, and it's just
that some singers ha' never learned, so that they wonder why it is
ithers are successfu' while they canna get an engagement to save them.
They blame the managers, and say a man can't get a start unless he
have friends at coort. But it's no so, and I can prove it by the way I
won my way.

I had done most of my work in Scotland when Mac and I and the wife
began first really to dream aloud aboot my gae'in to London. Oh, aye,
I'd been on tours that had crossed the border; I'd been to Sunderland,
and Newcastle on Tyne, but everywhere I'd been there was plenty Soots
folk, and they knew the Scots talk and were used to the flutter o' ma
kilts. Not that they we