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Lie Down SingingHow a songbook saved my nighttimes.

By Emily BazelonPosted Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2008, at 6:58 AM ET

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All of this reveals, of course, that my affection for this songbook is overdetermined: I'm a child of the 1970s whose parents never graduated from folk to rock or anything else. More than I like to admit, the snatches of songs in my head come from a dozen albums that range, the opposite of widely, from Baez and Seeger (especially in his Weavers incarnation) to Simon and Garfunkel. Also lodged in my brain are pieces of a large number of equally embarrassing show tunes. And so for me, leafing through Rise Up Singing is like finishing a series of long-lost thoughts. Finally, I have in my grasp the second verse to "Day Is Done," and, look, there's a third one too, and now I won't bring down Simon's wrath by humming for bar after bar.

The book's other small wonders are its intricate organization—it's indexed by artist, title, subject, and culture—and its simplified guitar chords. For every song, Blood worked hard to find an arrangement that an amateur musician could handle, in a range that the amateur singers around him could handle. In fact, the main criteria for choosing songs for the book were whether they could be sung easily, whether Blood and Patterson liked a particular title, and whether it contributed to the book's lefty political slant. "There aren't a lot of Civil War songs," Blood says. I bring up "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," and he adds, "well, yeah, but that's a song about war not going so well."

Rise Up Singing doesn't pretend to be all-inclusive. There isn't a lot of blues or jazz or country, much less rock. Instead, the book has the kind of lock on one corner of Americana that fosters good-natured rebellion. According to Blood and Patterson, a group called Sit Down Singing went to the trouble to produce its own fake songbook—the perfect tribute from one ex-hippie to another.

In the campfire, singalong culture from which Blood comes, it's not how well you sing, it's that you're singing at all. My husband lives out this motto a few times a week. He's not so tuneful, but he sings a version of "Charlie on the MTA" that Simon can't get enough of. This song has its logical fallacies. Written to protest a fare increase on the Boston T, its protagonist must "ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston" because he doesn't have the fare to get off—never mind that his wife shows up every day at the Scollay Square station to hand him a sandwich "as the train comes rumblin' through." As Simon's older brother, Eli, likes to point out, she could have also handed over a nickel.

But this is not the point. The point is to give Simon the musical equivalent of comfort food. Parents weren't Blood's original target audience—"We originally thought about the book for schools or camps, or for the picket line," he says—but Blood and Patterson think that families are a sizeable share of the book's market. Sometimes, my kids sing along with me at night. And in my perfect universe, one of them learns how to play guitar.