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This site offers a library of original text works – nonfiction, fiction or poetry of all lengths, published and unpublished – that have been submitted free by their authors.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

Then and now

July 31, 2008

reunion

As I said last time, our 50-year high school reunion was great, but please excuse me for a moment while I pick a bone with my classmates:

You guys really pissed me off, you know. You all looked great. You were supposed to look like geezers in your late 60s, but noooo . . . Oh, I know, you said I looked great, too, but that was just polite lies. But you guys really did look great. Damn it. Well, you’re all too good-looking to stay mad at. So I guess you’re forgiven.

In fact, thanks to Patty and Al and all the others who organized the reunion. It was at The Oaks Golf Links in Somersworth, N.H., a fancy place with a fancy dining room — large banquet tables with linen tablecloths, tall crystal centerpieces and great food. (Are restaurants in general getting better, or am I just getting hungrier?)

Jean Anne, one of our more vivacious cheerleaders, was still jumping around like a teenager. (I still don’t believe your story about getting a knee replacement.)

Chuck and Marcia, sorry I missed you. I don’t know how it happened. I think that’s you in the left foreground of my terrible photo above. (You’d never believe that for many of my 38 years in the newspaper business, I also carried a camera and processed my own film and prints. But that was before digital cameras.)

Stan, we never did get a chance to discuss your latest oceanographic achievements, but since Lamont-Doherty’s headquarters are just south of us on the Hudson River, maybe we’ll get together there.

John, it really was great to see Christa, ha, ha . . . and you. Really, old buddy.

Cynthia, who went to the junior prom with me, you still are youthful enough to go to anyone’s junior prom, and so is your husband, the charming Richard.

Butch and Joy, our class couple, you have no right to look exactly — and I mean exactly — like your yearbook picture.

And now to Roger, Irene, Richard, Donald, Paul, Royal, Maurice, John, Laurel, Louie, Pete, Ruth, George, Peter, Carl, Dave, Bruce and Ronald, I miss you. We miss you. You died too soon.

Nearly 100 people came to the reunion. Some, of course, were spouses, but that’s not bad for a class of either 125 or 150, depending on my memory. Maybe some of our cohesiveness comes from the fact that we went to a great school. For those who missed the comments section of my Oct. 21 entry (and I’m sure no one did), I reprint a picture of Spaulding High School, Rochester, N.H.:

spaulding

My wife, Bonnie, said she was struck by how nice everyone at the reunion was. Well, yes, they are nice. In New Hampshire, it’s the law: If you’re not nice, you have to leave the state. Which explains why I now live in New York.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

Chapter 32: Hillsborough of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard, reunited with Melanie, goes to visit longtime friend Elliot in Hillsborough and finds him now completely insane. The next day, Elliot kills himself with the same revolver his father had used to commit suicide.

Chapter 20 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess takes Brian back to her old town, back to the diner where the owner, a friend of her ex-husband, on the day of her divorce had called her a whore.

– Sid Leavitt

Posted in Uncategorized |

2 Responses

  1. Bernita says:

    “In New Hampshire, it’s the law: If you’re not nice, you have to leave the state. Which explains why I now live in New York.”
    ~giggling~
    Which also likely explains my own 1,000 mile migration.

  2. Sid Leavitt says:

    Yeah, but you Canadians are all nice — especially you, Bernita.

Leave a Comment

Please note: Comment moderation is enabled and may delay your comment. There is no need to resubmit your comment.