Readers and writers blog

Our new songbook, Sing along with ease, is drawing endorsements from around the world:

• Barack Obama: That health care thing isn’t going so well, but my musical life is at an all-time high, thanks to Sing along with ease. We now have a couple of singalongs a week at the White House.

• George W. Bush: Frankly, I used to think of singalongs as a commie plot, but Sing along with ease has changed my perspectioness. Gives me something to do in retiredom. I just wish Cheney would stop singing flat.

• Pope Benedict XVI: Hey, I really like two of those 313 oldtime favorite songs in Sing along with ease — ‘Santa Lucia’ and ‘O Sole Mio.’ [EDITOR’S NOTE: Those songs really are in the book.]

• Motorhead: Enough of this heavy metal trash. Sing along with ease has drawn us back to the old favorites — and is now our official songbook.

• Black Sabbath: Yeah, what they said.

• The Rev. Pat Robertson: Sing along with ease is clearly the result of a deal with the devil, but it does include more than two dozen religious songs and Christmas carols. What the heck . . . thumbs up!

• The Devil: Yeah, what he said.

Seriously, friends, this songbook is the real deal. It’s the same one that our little family band — me, my wife and her parents — have been using and compiling for the past 17 years playing at various nursing homes and senior residences in our area. We still play three times a week.

It’s a good deal, and it’s the simplified sheet music that makes it so. Our sheet music shows a single-line melody that a basic guitarist or pianist can play along with the chords over the melody and the lyrics beneath or that an unaccompanied vocalist can follow easily. Sheet music — that is, music showing the actual tune — can be expensive. We found a typical two-sheet song on the Internet for $4.95 or about $2.50 per sheet. Dividing the price of our book, $39.95, by the number of songs in it, 313, gives a per-sheet cost of less than 13 cents. Our songs are easier to follow, and each is on one sheet, so there’s no flipping pages.

And it’s an idealistic deal.

Sure, we get some money out of it — enough to cover our materials, equipment and production costs — but this is more altruism than capitalism. Singing old songs with senior citizens — songs that were new when they were — can be, like the credit card ad says, priceless.

This book could be just the vehicle to do that. Not just for volunteers but for staff members at nursing homes or senior residences who would like to add a singalong to their activities schedule.

And it’s not just for seniors. There have been times in my younger life when I felt so crappy that I just wanted to be alone. I would sit at a piano and pick away at a sad tune. If I’d had this songbook — yes, there are some sad songs in there — it might have gone a little easier.

Or think about sitting down with your family and singing some of these songs. Maybe that piano you neglect or that guitar sitting in a dusty corner or that voice you raise just for arguing …. maybe they have a better use.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top was found on travel writer Andrew Petcher’s website Have Bag, Will Travel.

The purpose of our new singalong songbook, Sing along with ease, is to make music, well, easier. And a lot cheaper.

A comparison is in order:

At right are two samples of the song ‘Amazing Grace.’ The top one, subtitled ‘Them,’ really is a sample — the first five bars is all they show you on the Internet because they want you to buy the whole thing. The bottom one, ‘Us,’ is the entire song from our book, complete with four verses.

• To begin with, their song is written for the piano in the key of G, which brings the range on a guitar to an uncomfortably low level for most singers (please see note below). Our song is in the key of C, all of it in a comfortable singing range.

• Their song, because it is written for piano, shows all the chord notes a pianist would play. That requires two staffs — the upper or treble clef and the lower or bass clef — and makes the music more complicated than singers need. Singers require only the top note in the upper staff, which is the simple melody line that our song shows. And our song, rather than show all the chord notes, simply shows the chord notation above the melody. Even a basic guitarist knows those chords by their notation — C, C7, F, Am, G, G7 — or, if not, we explain on the first page of the songbook where to find them. Same for pianists.

• Because their song requires two staffs to show all the chord notes, it also spills over onto two pages — and that’s for ‘Amazing Grace,’ which, as you can see, is not a long song. Truly long songs would require three, four or more pages of sheet music. Our song is complete on one page — as are each of the 313 songs in the book.

• Finally, for their sheet music, they want $4.95. Our song — less than 13 cents.

After 17 years of doing it ourselves, we want to make singing along as easy and inexpensive as possible for those people who just might want to volunteer to lead singalongs in nursing homes or senior residences — perfect audiences for the oldtime favorite songs that our book offers — or for those people who might want to do a little family singing at home. What a perfect way for the over-50s to introduce some of these classics to the under-50s.

Call any of it a cultural exchange.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

A guitar plays sheet music an octave lower than does a piano. A guitar has a narrower range than a piano, and bringing the pitch down an octave brings all the singable notes from the bass and treble clefs into a guitar’s range on a single upper staff.

Our little family band has been using a slick new version of the songbook we use for singalongs we lead three times a week at local nursing homes and senior residences.

The songbook, entitled Sing along with ease, is now in production, and we are, to put it bluntly, plugging the hell out of it. In fact, I’m thinking of changing the name of this weblog to reflect that it has become, while still a library of written works, basically a promotion for this songbook.

Because I think the book is a great idea — specifically, a great help to volunteers or staff members who would like to have singalongs at their nursing homes or senior residences but don’t feel equipped to do it. This book would take them a long way to doing it.

Our band — we call it the Hat Band because we all wear hats — are not professional singers or musicians, but then again, neither are our audience members. We’re all the same — all folks along in years who enjoy sharing those good oldtime songs.

The photo at top shows our songbook in action at a singalong just yesterday. Well, the book is sort of upper-left-center on the music stand in front of the glamorous lady in the blue sweater and wide-brimmed hat — my mother-in-law, Virginia Sunderman, looking across at the very relaxed banjo player, Glenn Sunderman, her husband and my father-in-law. My wife, Bonnie, their daughter, plays with us on weekends. I am represented in the photo by my guitar sitting upright in my chair while I am taking the picture.

The songbook is a great help to amateurs like us who enjoy getting together and singing along. It shows lyrics, simple one-note melody lines and chord progressions that can be played — or learned — by the most basic guitarists or pianists.

And there are more than 300 oldtime favorites, all songs we’ve collected over the years. Here’s a sample of the titles:

America the Beautiful, Ain’t We Got Fun, April Showers, Auld Lang Syne, The Band Played On, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Carolina in the Morning, Danny Boy, Frankie and Johnny, Freight Train, Hava Nagila, Home on the Range, In the Garden, I Love You Truly, I’ve Been Working on the Railroad, Jingle Bells, Let Me Call You Sweetheart, Memories, Missouri Waltz, My Melancholy Baby, Paper Doll, Pretty Baby, Red River Valley, Santa Lucia, Silent Night, Silver Threads, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, The Yellow Rose of Texas.

And that’s just a tenth of the listings.

We produce the songbooks, and we’ll be glad to answer questions about them. They’re $39.95 plus $3.16 for shipping anywhere in the United States. That’s less than 13 cents a song — World War I prices for sheet music. So far, the best sheet-music songbook I’ve found on the Internet offers only 53 titles and sells for $79.95.

Even if you don’t want to run around your town annoying senior citizens with your music, it’s a great songbook for family gatherings or just playing by yourself on the old upright piano or that old guitar you haven’t touched since the 1960s.

– Sid Leavitt

Yes, I’ve been away — exactly a year, I see by the date of our last entry — but now I’m back. And here’s what I’ve been doing:

Singalong songbooks. I’m now producing and selling them. Cheap.

What’s that, you say? Who needs a singalong songbook? Well, about 17 years ago, I could have used one.

That’s when I showed up for my second session as a backup guitarist for a singalong at a local nursing home and found I was on my own. I guess the activities director who had led the first session a week earlier figured I should do it myself, being a volunteer and all. She was right, of course, but I had only six song sheets left over from that first session, and I sang and played those six songs for a solid hour.

Well, it’s now 17 years later and my repertoire has grown — by about 300 songs I’ve collected over those years. I should say we’ve collected, because for most of those years, I’ve been part of a family band that includes my wife, Bonnie, and her parents, Glenn and Virginia. We still play three times a week at local nursing homes and senior residences.

Our singalong book now contains 313 songs. It’s a collection of oldtime favorites that most everyone over 50 knows — and most everyone under 50 ought to know. Over the past year, I’ve committed those songs to a computer program called PrintMusic that prints them out, one to a page, in simple musical notation that any music enthusiast — from the most basic singer or instrumentalist to the most accomplished vocalist or accompanist — can follow.

Believe it or not, a good singalong book is hard to find. First, you need all the good old songs that have survived the years. Second, you need the words and music — and by music, I don’t mean simply guitar or piano chords over the words, which is what most singalong books offer. No, you need the melody lines as well. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve known the first few bars or the refrain of a song but didn’t have a clue about the rest of it. However, the problem with most sheet music showing melodies is that it’s too complicated.

Our songbook is simple — single-note melody lines with chords shown above and lyrics below, all in ‘easy’ keys — mostly C and G — that we’ve found most guitarists and pianists can play and, more important, most people can sing comfortably. That’s why we’ve titled the book Sing along with ease.

The book is bound in a three-hole loose-leaf binder. So you can take pages out or put new ones in, make fresh copies of sheets that have been torn or make copies for audiences.

We’re selling our book for $39.95 plus $3.16 for shipping anywhere in the continental U.S. Searching the Internet, the only comparable sheet-music songbook I’ve found — that is, a book of old songs showing melodies as well as words and chords — offers only 53 songs and sells for $79.95. Our book contains 260 more songs and sells for 40 bucks less.

This book is perfect for volunteers or staff members who lead singalongs at nursing homes or senior residences. It’s also great for family or community get-togethers.

You don’t have to be an accomplished musician to accompany these songs. For hobby guitarists, the chords are simple. For hobby pianists, just play the chords on the left hand, the single-note melodies on the right. In fact, the book tells you where to find basic guitar and piano chords.

So tell your friends. For the price of a couple DVDs, they can sing along with the old standards, more than 300 of them. And do it with ease.

– Sid Leavitt