Glen Campbell, Hoagie Carmichael, Bob Dylan? All their stuff is going to be copyrighted, and you shouldn't be doing it.

I admit that the possibility of somebody from ASCAP dropping in on you is slim, but it has happened to people I know.

So go to a public library and look in the music section (somewhere in the 780's) and check out a couple of those songbooks with titles such as "Good Old Songs that Everybody Knows" and add some songs from the public domain to your repertoire.

In my experience, senior citizens like songs from before their time just fine. So don't be afraid to use stuff from the 1880's and 1890's. Maybe it's because these were the songs they learned in school as kids.

Recently I did a show for Alzheimer's patients. These are people who could hide their own Easter eggs, but they remembered and sang all the words to "Five-foot-two, eyes of blue."