Singalong
songbooks
now for sale

Easy sheet music
for 300+ favorites

$39.95*

Plus electronic templates
for audience lyrics sheets

Finally, a singalong songbook of sheet music with easy-to-follow melody lines, chords and lyrics for more than 300 oldtime favorites. songbookIdeal for singalongs at nursing homes, senior residences or just at your own home. Bound in a loose-leaf binder of durable vinyl, unsnaps for access to pages. (To see a photo of the book, click here. To see a sample song page, click here.)

The songs have been collected and transcribed over the past 18 years by the Hat Band, a family foursome of string players and singers who still lead singalongs three times a week at area nursing homes and senior residences as volunteers.

Sing along with ease is the same songbook used by the Hat Band and is its special project to encourage others to volunteer as singalong leaders. As the band adds numbers to its songbook – it does so slowly – free copies of the additional songs are sent out to those who already have the songbook.

We also send out electronic templates of words to more than 240 songs that can be reformatted into lyrics sheets for audience members, a great way to get audiences involved. The reformatting is done in the OpenOffice program, and for those who don't have that program, we provide a link where it can be downloaded for free.

To order Sing along with ease, email sidleavitt@yahoo.com directly or enter your email address as a comment in our latest blog entry and we will email you. (Your email address won't appear in the comments section.)

To review our sales procedures and philosophy, click on our entry entitled We trust you.

*plus $5.79 shipping in U.S.

Free books
still offered

from frustrated writers
to adventurous readers

This site offers a library of original text works – nonfiction, fiction or poetry of all lengths, published and unpublished – that have been submitted free by their authors. To find these, please visit the 'Works' section in the upper righthand column of this page. This site does not claim copyright to any of these works, and no modification of any work has been done except for style formatting. No work may be reused commercially, and any noncommercial reuse must give credit to the author.

To upload...

Sorry, we're not accepting any new works right now.

To comment...

Readers are free to download any listing from the 'Works' section, subject to the aforementioned restrictions, and to provide comments to the site administrator at sidleavitt@yahoo.com for publication in the 'Comments on works' listing. To comment on any excerpt or other post shown in the center column, simply do so directly beneath the post by clicking on the '(No) Comments' link. Unless otherwise specified, all comments will be published, subject to libel guidelines.

About us...

This blog was started as a nonprofit website giving writers a place to publish their work at no cost and readers a chance to read that work and, if they chose, to comment on it. Now we are concentrating on a singalong songbook, also an idealistic project that promotes volunteer music programs at nursing homes and senior residences as well as family singing at home, all through easy, low-cost sheet music. Although we no longer accept new works from authors, all previous submissions are still available in our 'Works' section. We also maintain a blogroll of diverse sites, all well-written, for readers to explore, although at present, no new sites are being accepted for listing. The site's founder and administrator is its first nonfiction contributor, Sid Leavitt, a retired newspaper editor who lives in Lake Katrine, N.Y.

Meta

Consider this

May 6, 2007

glasses

You know what I like about writing? No, not text messaging, instant messaging or chat room exchanges. I’m talking about writing — where people sit down at a computer, word processor, typewriter or just with a piece of paper and pencil in hand and write. To someone else or, and this has special appeal to me, just to themselves.

What I like about writing is that it is contemplative.

This combination website-weblog has been up and running for less than three weeks, and so far, there hasn’t been a lot of interchange between readers and writers. But we’ve already either attracted or enlisted six writers. And only one of them — well, maybe two — write professionally.

That’s a pretty good record, considering the proliferation of weblogs these days. And the reason is that, despite society’s ever-increasing interconnectedness through radio, television, telephones, cell phones, computer chat rooms and instant text messagers, we humans are basically a contemplative bunch.

We need contemplation. We need quietness. We need connectedness with ourselves. We need to sort out our thoughts, our feelings, our memories, our observations and put them into written words.

That’s what the best writing is, even when it is intended for other people to read.

Our latest contributor is Barbara Phelps-McMichael, who plans in July to connect with a lot of people she hasn’t seen for a long time — her eighth-grade classmates at their 50th-year reunion. She communicates with them — and with us — in our latest nonfiction offering, “A Trip in Time.”

We’ve also had contributions from Virginia Sunderman in the poetry section and Blaise Schweitzer in the nonfiction section. In the blogroll, John H. Williams shares his thoughts about religion and life in the weblog Trite but True, Michael Moore — not the filmmaker but the Arizona philosopher-curmudgeon — offers essays and letters in Vox Clamantis, and an anonymous waiter tells you what he really thinks about his customers, his employers and his life in Waiter Rant.

Even though they need only their own, they could all use your contemplation.

– Sid Leavitt

Posted in Uncategorized |

2 Responses

  1. Maya Malinowska says:

    Dear Barbara!

    What a lovely piece of writing! and what a story of an extraordinary life and people! Touching and comforting … and most importantly — one that gave me hope … something I need so much right now as my Dad has been diagnosed with IPF. Is there any chance you could get in touch with me so that I could ask you some questions, please.

    If you could: meem@interia.pl . I would appreciate it SO MUCH!

    Thank you in advance.

    Kind regards,

    Maya

  2. Sid Leavitt says:

    Thank you for your comment, Maya, and I’m sure Barbara will appreciate it, too, when I give her a heads-up that it has come in.

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