Michael Sigalas

Osceola, oil on canvas, by Robert John Curtis (1816–1867). Painted from life at Fort Moultrie, Sullivan's Island, January 1838, for Dr. R.L. Baker. Curtis and Osceola developed a close friendship during the painting sessions, conversing at length while Osceola sat for the portrait. The clothing depicted is in the style of the Creek Indians, itself influenced by British military uniforms of the eighteenth century. The original hangs in the Charleston Museum. This is the portrait painted in the...

The former home of Joe Jackson's liquor store is still a place of business in West Greenville, SC. “A name is just a story people tell about you,” says Teddi in The Song Poet. By 1937, Shoeless Joe Jackson ran a liquor store on Pendleton Street in West Greenville, nearly twenty years removed from the roar of packed ballparks and the shadow of the Black Sox scandal. To most Americans, he was already becoming myth: outlaw slugger, banned natural genius, ghost of what baseball might have been....

I've had the stories and characters from The Song Poet inside me for years. Here's a song I wrote a decade ago, in the person of the novel's protagonist, Pete Zane, writing in 1937. Here it is in context from Chapter 59, "Plumb Hungry (Monday, May 3, 1937)," during a song-sharing meeting in Manhattan's Central Park between Peter and Teddi Cochrane--the Appalachian South Carolina poet that's becoming his icon --in the Orthodox sense of the word.. She hands the guitar back. “I started this...