The other Saturday night, Darling Wife and I were invited to a small acoustic jam hosted by one of our friends from the Downingtown meetup. We had a great time - and the level of musicianship was a big step up from meetups. It was assumed that everyone had a good feel for basic song structure, and would be able to follow along with whatever was going on. It sometimes felt like bring thrown into the deep end, but I kept up fairly well, and it was a lot of fun to be challenged.
One thing I realized afterwards is that I'm now pretty comfortable taking a lead for 8 or 16 bars. There's usually someone leading the song, and he'll nod at someone to take the next section. When I started playing at jams (2+ years ago), that made me break out into a sweat, because I simply didn't know how to do it and didn't want to embarrass myself.
Now I'm happy when I get the nod - not because I'm making any jaws drop with my sizzling leads (I'm definitely *not*) - but just that I can do it at all. All I need to know is what key we're in, and I can do something. The only issue I sometimes still have is the question of major/minor. I'll know, for example, that we're in the key of D - but are we in D-major or D-minor? It's usually obvious - but occasionally it's not. I still feel very much like a beginner - but it feels good to realize that I can now do something that I couldn't before.
The other thing I realized (at least for the group I was playing with) is that if I'm going to play with groups like that, I should be more familiar with some of the folk standards. There were a number of Bob Dylan and John Prine songs called for, and neither are hard to play, but I didn't know them. I've been listening to and playing some John Prine, and he's fun. Here are a couple of my favorites:
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