Who can sing Rufus’s songs? (Part 2)

The previous posting seems to have garnered a flurry of responses on two of the RW bulletin boards: rutopia and rw.com.
I post their responses here.

A technique I use in teaching music theory from time to time, is after I’ve lectured for a while, I’ll stop, and with a straight face, draw a false conclusion to see who is actually listening:

“Soooo, two plus two is seven” and then go on. The students who are listening, interrupt me and say “hey, wait a minute.” Although my last post wasn’t exactly an example of this technique, the final line was calculated to provoke, and it did. It achieved exactly what I wanted, which was to hear a variety of opinions on who can sing Rufus’s songs. Read the comments on the previous posting as well as the ones here to see the range of responses people made. I will insert my own responses to them in the comments section.