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

Following the law

July 26, 2007

law

In 20 years as a newspaper reporter, I covered a lot of court cases — mostly criminal but some civil, the latter by far the more complicated of the two — and I always appreciated finding a judge or lawyer who made civil litigation easier to follow. Well, I’ve found another one.

J. Craig Williams, a southern California attorney, writes a weblog called May It Please The Court, and he writes it so well that it should please not only the court but also his readers.

Just in case you think the details of courts and the law don’t matter to you, consider some of the subjects Williams has discussed in four years of blogging:

• Sports-related negligence: In one of his recent entries, July 16, Williams cites a case in which waivers of liability in sports or recreational programs or services were held not to be always valid. Specifically, a waiver you sign for a sports or recreational activity may not automatically deprive you of legal recourse against gross negligence. It’s a California case, but Williams expects it to “set a new benchmark in tort opinions across the country.”

• Insurance policy limitations (May 18, 2004): An auto insurance customer thought he had $250,000 in liability coverage, but when he loaned his car to someone else, he found his liability in that instance plummeted to $15,000, a fact that wasn’t listed on the declarations page of his policy by name but rather by endorsement number buried deep down in the policy — and in a single line. The customer eventually won before the California Supreme Court. But it should make the rest of us wonder what’s hidden in our insurance policies.

• Volunteer liability (Jan. 20, 2005): A materials testing company sued the volunteer fire company in Amityville, N.Y., for some cleanup costs after a fire, claiming the firefighters added to chemical contamination by the way they doused the fire and did some cleanup. The case was thrown out, but Williams concludes, “Now when fire departments rush to a fire, they’ll have to take their lawyer along.”

• Property valuations (March 20, 2006): A San Diego man purchased a property for $185,000 and got the local assessor to reduce its valuation from $300,000 to the purchase price based on the possibility of unexploded ordnance from a nearby Marine base. Then the owner discovered that the local gas-and-electric utility had an easement across the property that was recorded in 1972 but wasn’t listed on his title insurance policy. Now he sued to get his valuation down to $40,000, but he lost in court because he missed the four-year limitations period, even though he didn’t know about the easement until more recently.

• Judicial pay (July 9): The average partner in the nation’s top 100 law firms last year made more than $1 million — five times the salary of the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and seven times what most top federal and state judges get. How does that affect the quality of justice you may receive if you are hauled into court? More to the point, how does that affect the quality of legal representation you may receive if you can’t afford the top 100?

• Just plain good advice, legal and otherwise, to anyone dealing with the public (Aug. 4, 2003): “If you want to avoid getting sued, treat others fairly and solve their problems . . . If you provide more than you’re paid for, you create goodwill. Plus, it keeps you from having to hire a lawyer.”

Weblogs about the law — they’re called ‘blawgs’ in cyber-speak — abound on the Internet, but many of them are hard to follow for a layman, and some of them are, well, indecipherable. The law isn’t simple, so it’s good to find someone who writes knowledgeably and clearly about it.

Plus, Williams has a sense of humor. When he checked out his name on Avvo, a new website that ranks lawyers, he found to his surprise that he was “deceased after practicing law for some 56 years.” That would be quite a feat, he conceded, considering that he is only 50 years old.

– Sid Leavitt

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