Over the last year, I’ve been adapting tunes from the 1931 Songs of Optimist International, an extraordinarily rare book, for use in the Optimist Club of Athens, Tennessee. The club had not sung together in a while, so it felt natural to me to lead them in some of the songs of their distant past as an international organization. That effort culminated in the above file, a song book containing several tunes, fully typeset from sources on IMSLP and other public domain repositories, all with the Optimist lyrics from the book, plus a few tunes that may be of interest to Athenian Optimists, like Rocky Top (parodied with my own Optimist lyrics), a song about Tennessee, and a few patriotic and holiday tunes for meetings that approach times where those are appropriate.

It’s been a pleasure to be a part of this local civic club for the last year or so. They meet at 7 a.m. at the Tennessee Wesleyan dining hall every Thursday morning. You can imagine that shift in mood that happens when people of all walks of Athenian life assemble weekly to do the work of the club and suddenly sing a rousing chorus of some secular song together. As far as I know, this is the only place in town that this happens, especially this regularly.

I had never heard of this organization; I never noticed the Optimist Club sign in Back to the Future 1 and 2 or ever was around one until coming to Athens. The organization essentially exists as a means of associating for the betterment of the people of the community, especially the youth. Interestingly though, it regularly recites an “Optimist Creed,” which is available on the last page of that song book. It was written by Christian D. Larson, a prominent author of the same New Thought movement that deeply influenced both Christian Science and the Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity—two quite different organizations!

Evidently, New Thought centered around the notion that thoughts are more real than physical things. So, Larson advocated for mindset change being the primary cause for positive change in one’s life, rather than mere change of circumstance. For the Christian Scientists, it means focusing on the healing power of prayer. For Sinfonians, it is in the mysterious power of music in creating a better society. For Optimists, it’s literally greeting every creature you meet with a smile and being pleased in the successes of others as much as you are about your own.

People are great. What a joy to contribute a bit of the power of social singing to this community.