Sing and Change the World: From Davy Crockett to Princess Di...Dozens of Voices Show You How - Softcover

Dayton, David Edward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0944031927 ISBN 13: 9780944031926

Publisher: Aslan Pub, 2002

Synopsis

You don’t have to be an Italian tenor to shake the rafters or shake up the status quo. With a little courage, a touch of whimsy and David Dayton as your guide, you’ll soon discover how singing can change your life and help you change the world.

Sing & Change the World! combines historic facts in easily digestible form, with chicken-soup inspiration and Mozart-effect musical power to demonstrate the impact of singing on ordinary life. Singing has saved lives, freed slaves and stopped a world war. Historic characters, modern celebrities and everyday people have changed themselves and their world with a well-timed tune.

Sing & Change the World will show you how to:
sing & save a life
sing & find success
sing & promote healing
sing & change your mood
sing & solve problems
sing & change the world

About this title

About the Author

Three-time Sacramento, California Teacher of the Year David Edward Dayton has jump-started a second career with his new book Sing and Change the World. Based upon his twenty-five years of teaching plus four years of intensive singing research, the book chronicles moments when a song saved a life, made a celebrity, or changed a nation. Included are letters from singing notables such as Frankie Laine, Robert Goulet, and even Yoko Ono.David lives in Sacramento with his wife Karin and eight children. His goal is to speak and sing to organizations across the nation and around the world about the power of positive singing.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE CHRISTMAS CAROL TRUCE - 1914

"As long as men continue to struggle for a better world, they will need songs to encourage them in that struggle." Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer

Sing and change the world?

It has happened.

June 28, 1914, an assassin gunned down Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo. The killer, Gavrilo Princip, worked with a terrorist group in Serbia.

Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for the assassination and declared war.

A system of military alliances pulled all the major European powers into the fight. Most expected quick victory. Most received lingering destruction.

Ten million troops would die.

Emperors would fall.

The peace settlement would create conditions leading to Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II. World War I would direct and delineate the course of the twentieth century---one hundred years of the millenium's worst armed destruction and militant slaughter.

In December of 1914, the Germans and the British ordered their million-man armies to dig a line of trenches across Belgium and northeastern France. The soldiers blackened the ice with bombs, gunpowder, and blood.

But then came December 24th of 1914 and the stroke of midnight.

A trickle of song rose from the German side of the line.

Stille Nacht, heilige nacht.

The British answered back.

All is calm. All is bright.

The two mud-caked armies joined each other in carols over the bleeding trenches. The miracle expanded. Soldiers laid down their bayonets, set aside their pistols, and called a Christmas truce. The singing led to sharing cigarettes and brandy, and playing soccer in no man's land by the light of the flares.

The "war to end all wars" stopped.

The battle which would open the door to continental slaughter took a recess.

The fight to reconfigure the world, which would set the stage for another Armageddon culminating in the fission bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, paused for a song.

Then came the end of Christmas.

And the end of singing.

The fighting resumed.

One million British and two million German dead.

As one commentator noted, "One wishes that they could have gone on singing."

Even so, for one day, a song made good Christmas's promise of peace on earth, and temporarily timed out world war.

Sing and stop a massacre.

Harmonious Fact: How did Franz Gruber and Joseph Mohr solve the problem of a broken-down organ and subsequent loss of music for Christmas mass? Franz began strumming his guitar; within a short time, he devised the melody for the world's most beloved Christmas carol---"Silent Night". He shared the tune with Father Joseph who pulled a set of appropriate lyrics out of his drawer which he had written years before. The song not only "saved" Christmas mass; it later rose up over the trenches to suspend world war and "save" Christmas in 1914.

Over 200 more stories and facts about singing in Sing and Change the World.

Edition details

• Publisher: Aslan Pub
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0944031927
• ISBN 13: 9780944031926
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224