Singalong
songbooks
now online

Price slashed on
easy sheet music
for 365 favorites

$24.95*

Plus electronic templates
for singalong lyrics sheets

Finally, a singalong songbook of sheet music with easy-to-follow melody lines, chords and lyrics for 365 oldtime favorites. Ideal for singalongs at nursing homes, senior residences – and we're finding that a lot of folks want them for their own use at home.songbook(A great help for beginning piano students.)

(To see a sample song page, click here, then right-click (twice, if necessary) and ask to 'view image.')

We now market and distribute our songbook, Sing Along with Ease, exclusively online: You order online with a credit card and we send you the book online via email for you to print out at home. While that requires a little work on your part, it eliminates the delay in mail delivery (often a week or more) and cuts the price by about half.

And we continue to offer a 100 percent money-back guarantee as well as unlimited technical support via email. If you're not completely satisfied with what we've sent you or how we help you via email, we refund all your money promptly.

The songs have been collected and transcribed over the past 20 years by the Hat Band, a family foursome of string players and singers who for those two decades have held singalongs at area nursing homes and senior residences as volunteers.

Marketed for years in printed and bound form, the songbook is the same one that has been used by the Hat Band in its volunteer singalongs. Any additional songs the band adds to its collection – it does so slowly – are sent out free to those who already have the songbook.

We also send out electronic templates of words to more than 240 songs that can be formatted into lyrics sheets. For volunteer singalong leaders, it's a great way to get audiences involved. For home use, it's a great way to help your guests sing along as you sit at a piano or with a guitar playing an old favorite.

To order Sing Along with Ease, use the PayPal button below. As soon as we are notified of the order (usually within 24 hours), we'll email you the songbook and lyrics templates.

Our money-back guarantee is based on the same sales philosophy we used when we marketed the songbooks by regular mail. Please see our entry entitled We trust you. (And please note that our attitude toward online financial transactions has evolved. We've found that PayPal has a gold-edge reputation for security.)

For any questions or assistance, email our site administrator at sidleavitt@yahoo.com.

* The old price of the songbook that we printed and shipped by regular mail was $39.95, and the shipping, because the book weighed about three pounds, was an additional $5.79 in the continental U.S., pushing the total price to $45.74.

(To Canada, limited to air mail only, shipping was $12.85, plus a $10 bank fee for processing international checks. That's a total of $62.80.)

The new price of $24.95 is complete, no extra charges.

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.

This site is owned by Readersandwritersblog LLC, which is solely responsible for its content.

Meta

Seeking

June 8, 2007

seeking

Nathanael is a religion graduate student in his mid-20s who thinks deeply and writes with great appeal. And I was very glad to find him and add his site, Despair and Coffee, to our blogroll.

The name of his site seemed appropriate after I had searched for two days through a couple of hundred weblogs and was near despair myself. My bright idea of how to ease the search for well-written blogs had burned out.

I had decided that instead of searching seemingly endless blog catalogs, I would go to the well-written blogs I’d already found and look through their comments and links for more winners. It didn’t work out very well. For one thing, the links often were to sites similar in theme to the blogs I’d already found, and I’m trying to keep our blogroll as diverse as possible. In other cases, the comments came from admirers who didn’t write as well as the admired.

And so it was back to the blogosphere underbrush.

Granted, I’ve been at this search only for a short time, but I’ve been diligent about it, and I must have gone through 5,000 sites by now. And I’m starting to spend less time on sites where I see the following:

(1) Content that only friends or family would appreciate.

(2) Pictures of cats or dogs. We have a dog and three cats and love them all, but as in (1), you have to know them.

(3) Illustrations of unicorns.

(4) Obvious grammatical errors. From a blog that will remain nameless: “I started out as a broadcast journalist, but fate took it’s course when . . .” Forget it.

(5) Celebrity prattle.

(6) Authors’ accounts of the difficulties of writing that first novel when the novel hasn’t been finished.

(7) White letters on dark backgrounds. Not distinctive, overused and just hard to read.

(8) Overuse of profanity, although this can be a judgment call. One writer, describing an idol-driven TV show as a ’steaming pile of monkey shit,’ said he turned to a different show that was a “bazillion times better than some no-talent, booger-eatin’, fuckstick do(ing) fucking karaoke.” A bit overstated, but considering the show, it’s hard to disagree.

All pretty lightweight compared with what Nathanael is thinking about:

Life: “I catch myself frequently assigning a date other than the present for whenever I’ll feel satisfied with my daily life . . . I dread the hours my 20-page research paper will require . . . Life generally strikes me in a similar way . . . However, I wonder if I’m naively concluding that satisfaction is contingent upon situational factors rather than a personal choice to make the most of what one has. What if there are always things which one wishes weren’t part of his or her life? Does this necessitate discontentment?”

Love: “As time passes and the relationship endures, dramatic differences emerge or become sources of discord for the first time. And the differences aren’t found beautiful anymore but rather something that needs to change about the other.”

God: “I was diagnosed with achalasia, a rare disorder in which the muscles of the esophagus fail . . . A secret part of me blamed God (for) some cosmic endgame and my superfluous role in it . . . To be frank, though such thoughts are further removed than they have been in some time, deep down they lurk, subconsciously lingering to prevent me from being blindsided again.”

The afterlife: “What if the soul is merely derivative of human consciousness, a figment which dematerializes immediately at death and the final failure of one’s cognitive processes? . . . No matter if one feigns indifference, attempts to ignore, avoid, delay, hasten, or embrace it, death requires a conscious response. Maybe the perception of the soul is an unconscious response. Or maybe not.”

Nathanael has been blogging about five months now. The two dozen entries on his site, most fairly lengthy, are well-reasoned reflections of a young man seeking answers to questions of the ages.

– Sid Leavitt

Posted in Uncategorized |

One Response

  1. Nathanael says:

    Thanks for the generous words. This was quite unexpected.

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