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 on the sample (several times, 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.

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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.

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Play along with ease

March 27, 2012

Hello again, o faithful weblog. It’s been almost 15 months since we last talked, but I’ve been busy … well, as busy as a retired guy can be … promoting our songbook (yes, there it is in the lefthand column) and what it in turn promotes. Which is:

Easy music to play and sing along with.

An easy way to play that music is with what I call ‘fake’ piano. And that’s what I’ve been doing lately — making videos showing the basics of ‘fake’ piano.

I put the word in quotes because it’s not really fake. It’s just a simpler way to play the piano and have it sound pretty good — like you know what you’re doing. And at the bottom of this blog entry is a set of links so folks can see these videos and download a related set of sheet music and note and chord charts.

The downloads are free. With our best wishes.

I say ‘our’ because the songbook has been compiled by our family band — the Hat Band (we all wear hats) — and the videos are an outgrowth of that.

The songbook is a collection of 344 old favorites that we sing and play each week as volunteer singalong leaders at local senior residences. We — the other three members are my wife, Bonnie, and her parents, Glenn and Virginia — have been doing this for two decades at a number of senior residences and nursing homes. But lately, since we’re not getting any younger (our average age is now 79), we’ve cut back to only two singalongs a week.

We’d like to encourage others to start leading their own singalongs, and we hope the songbook and the videos will help.

But that’s not the only reason. These materials can also help someone just play at home on a piano that’s been ignored for years or on that guitar that’s been collecting dust since the ’70s.

Our band uses three instruments — Bonnie and I play acoustic guitars and Glenn plays the banjo and mandolin, sometimes also a fiddle (Virginia is a great harmony singer and emcee). We’re all strictly amateur musicians, but our audiences welcome us as if we were professionals.

Sometimes after the singalongs at one of the senior homes, I sit at their grand piano and play instrumentals of some of the old songs as the residents are wheeled or led away to their rooms.

I’m certainly no great pianist — you can tell that from the videos — but I’ve been faking it for years. And it sounds pretty good.

So check out these links. You don’t need the songbook. I’ve included sheet music for the six songs covered in the two videos, and the note and chord charts also are free.

Here is the first video: ‘Play the piano in 19 minutes.’ And here’s the second: ‘More ‘fake’ piano.’

Here’s the sheet music (see note below for best printing): From the first video: ‘Down in the Valley,’ ‘Amazing Grace,’ and ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon.’ From the second video: ‘Edelweiss,’ ‘All of Me,’ and ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.’

And the charts (same note applies here): Melody Notes (all positions), Chords 1 (C, C7, D7, Dm, F, Am, G, A) and Chords 2 (B7, E7, Em, Cm).

Best wishes.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE: Once a sheet music link has opened, don’t print the first image. Instead, save it to your desktop (right-click on it and choose ’save image as’), then open it from your desktop and print it. (The print of the first image will be too small.)

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