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This site offers a library of original text works – nonfiction, fiction or poetry of all lengths, published and unpublished – that have been submitted free by their authors.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

We couldn’t be prouder

November 8, 2007

pen

Scattered crumbs, trick mirrors, guilty murderers — all right, that’s what we’re talking about. Two new submissions to our Works section, each from sources one might think unlikely. But that’s the magic of writing, friends.

One submission — our first contemporary work of fiction — is a short story about a murder or two written by a kindly grandmother from the Midwest. The other submission is experimental poetry from a young military officer in southern California.

Thus, in the poetry section of Works, we present “Trick mirrors” and “Crumbs scattered around the terminator of the cortex,” two experimental works by Jason Gregoire using unorthodox grammar, structure and linguistic imagery.

In the fiction section, we present “Presumed Guilty” by Marjorie Pagel of Franklin, Wis., a short story narrated by a convicted murderer’s sympathetic pen pal.

We couldn’t be prouder. This was our original idea, before we became Readersandwritersblog.com, back when we were Readers-and-writers.com. The premise was that writers would write and submit their work for readers who would read and, if they cared to, comment on the writing, possibly leading to feedback from the writers, and there would be, as our subtitle says, an interactive universe of the written word.

At first, we got a few submissions, and we were delighted. But then, everything stopped. We’re not sure exactly why, but we suspect it’s because the Internet is such a tangled web that a site can stay lost for months, maybe forever, hidden from sight from readers and writers who might make use of it.

That’s really why we seek out weblogs that we consider well-written and post them on our blogroll. Because we know in many cases how hard it was to find them in a blogosphere bloated by chitter-chatter, celebrity and fan diaries and political and religious rants.

Anyway, two more writers have found us, and again, we’re glad of it.

Marjorie Pagel has been writing since the age of 9 when she self-published a book of poetry for her grandmother. For 10 years, she was a reporter and feature writer for Community Newspapers, a chain associated with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and continues to write a weblog, “Meet Me at the Corner,” published by one of the chain’s online affiliates, HalesCornersNOW. She also teaches college writing at Concordia University in Mequon, Wis. She and her husband have two grown children, three grandchildren and an English cocker spaniel, Annie.

Jason Gregoire is in his mid-20s and, when he is not busy with his military duties, dabbles in experimental fiction and poetry. His current experiments, in his words, “attempt to mesh stream-of-consciousness, surrealism and science fiction. The writing’s nebulous and occasionally esoteric assembly requires patience and imagination but, with effort, provides the reader a cipher key to the underpinnings of the message.”

Thank you both. And may we also recommend the other writers who have shared their words in the nonfiction, fiction and poetry sections of Works.

– Sid Leavitt

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2 Responses

  1. may says:

    that was a good sunday morning read.

  2. Dog training says:

    Very interesting… as always! Cheers from Switzerland.

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