Michael Sigalas

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...

Hey Friends, Many of you know I’ve spent the past several months researching, writing, and rewriting THE SONG POET, a Depression-era historical romance set between the streets of Hell’s Kitchen and the Appalachian mountains of South Carolina. THE PREMISE In Depression-weary 1937, a once-promising, now hack NYC songwriter and a tragedy-haunted, mystical Appalachian poetess cross paths through a phony Song Poet contest—meant to bilk the gullible and unsophisticated by offering false hope and...