Yep, loved your post 38th...
As I was reading it, I was wondering about Sweet Home Alabama, and there it was! :lol: As a (strat-playing) guitarist, I kinda like it. Then a couple of years back I had a work colleague who had been a bassist. He loathed Lynyrd Skynyrd because of that song, and I suddenly realised how "appealing" it could be to the bassist in that song!! The guitarist gets nice variations on the verses/choruses/links, but down the bottom it's just 3 chords round and round for as long as the audience wants to yell the chorus (or the guitarists want to do bad impressions of southern rock solos).
And the "those who sing 'em" principle - brilliant.
If we were able to rehearse it, I would give someone else's preference a fair go - even to the extent of learning the lyrics. But if I couldn't do it justice I'd say so. Sometimes they'd got so into the groove or whatever that they'd think it sounded fine even with my naff vocals. Then I'd have to admit "oh I love playing it, I just can't sing it - why don't you give it a go?" That would usually shut them up :lol:. The few times they forced me to do one live anyway it had exactly the effect I imagined - audience switches off because the singer can't do a decent rendition. So they kind of learnt not to push their luck on a song the singer couldn't manage.
I always had the ultimate sanction at a gig though - "I don't know the lyrics..." :lol:. This got used mainly for songs that we hadn't rehearsed or ever played together before, though.
We'd discovered that if I knew a song well enough to sing it and lead the band through the verse/chorus/etc changes, and if most of us had heard it enough or it wasn't too complex (Crowded House ruled out here!), then we could actually play it in a gig without ever having played it together before. It was usually an audience request, and the audience would know that's what we were doing, so it was kind of us showing off...
But Mustang Sally specifically is a case in point for the "I don't know the lyrics" strategy - even today I could not tell you how the vocal starts or what the song structure is, I just know the hooks that the audience does, so I can't actually perform it without paying attention to a recording and a bit of private rehearsal first (and that's probably why we never played it :lol:)