America's
Unfinished Song
Every song begins with someone history forgot.
Philadelphia, 1860.
Caleb Mackullman, a craftsman's son with an ear for melody, is sent south to his family's furniture-and-music shop in Richmond. There, with Virgil, an enslaved man whose phrases come over the garden wall before dawn, Virgil's daughter Jubilee, and his cousin Johanna, and with his sister Nora writing from home, he begins building a song around twenty-four notes. When Virginia secedes, Caleb follows his uncle into a Confederate uniform, and the notes go with him: into camps, onto a battlefield, and finally into history under other men's names.
America's Unfinished Song is an honest imagining of the people history left out of its most sacred melody, and of what it costs to make something the world will keep without ever knowing your name.
About the StoryTHE HISTORY BEHIND THE NOVEL
History credits “Taps” to General Daniel Butterfield, who reworked an older bugle call known as the “Scott Tattoo,” and to his bugler, Oliver Willcox Norton, who first played it at Harrison's Landing, Virginia, in July 1862. That same month, Captain John Tidball ordered it sounded over a soldier's grave. This novel keeps those names and imagines the hands that came before them.
Read the Opening
The Prologue and the first scene of Chapter One, from the [Month Year] manuscript.
Michael Gill
Michael Gill is the son of an Air Force fighter pilot and the oldest of nine children; his family lived in fourteen cities before he turned eighteen. After a career in software and product startups, he turned to fiction. America's Unfinished Song, his debut novel, began with a question he asked his father on the drive home from a military funeral: where did that song come from, and why do they play it?
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