I've always loved storytelling and writing
Photo Credit: Brett Hall
I began writing songs and poetry about the same time I began studying guigar, at age eleven. My journal writing began with the gift of a blank book when I was nineteen. I decided to fill it and have continued through many successive blank books, the reviewing of which over the years has frequently been sources of inspiration as well as great lessons in humility.
I also enjoy writing stories and essays, a few of which have been published in newspapers (San Francisco Chronicle; The Union) and magazines (Natural Pet; and 2paragraphs). Currently, I am working on a series of autobiographical stories based on some very uncanny and profound experiences in my life which I hope will inspire others to carry on through dark times.
Being a playwright wasn’t anything I ever thought about at all. Then, in my late thirties, a man approached me after one of my concerts of original songs and offered me a job creating a theatrical event for a children’s summer camp. A well paid job. Which I did. Fortunately, the event was a success, and I enjoyed myself immensely. Soon after that experience I was offered yet another job teaching music and theater to a group of young, home-schooled children. So began my career writing and directing youth musicals, lasting nearly twenty years and the creation of over sixty play productions.
The Cumberland Suite
On October 18, 2013, I presented “The Cumberland Suite” at the Nevada Theatre in Nevada City, CA. Inspired by a journal written by my great-great-great grandmother, Priscilla Beall McKaig, it’s an American story, a personal history of the Civil War and its
Ghosts of Cumberland
Synopsis—
Most unfortunately, in the spring of 1870, Myra Black, then 28, gave birth to a baby boy in Cumberland, Maryland, whose resemblance to my great-great grandfather, William Wallace McKaig Jr (we call him Willie, a Civil War Confederate officer) was by all accounts, notable. Willie, 29 years of age, and from a well-to-do family, was married. Not to Myra, however. The birth of Myra’s baby was, to say the least, a major scandal in Cumberland, if not all Maryland. Myra’s brother, Harry Crawford Black, 24, also a Confederate Army veteran, armed himself with two pistols and confronted Willie early one morning in downtown Cumberland and killed him. At the subsequent murder trial, Black was acquitted of the crime on the grounds that he had justifiably defended his family’s honor.
Willie’s mother, my great-great-great grandmother, Priscilla Beall McKaig, kept a journal before, during and after the Civil War. Understandably, perhaps, Priscilla mentions none of the above events in her journal. As to Myra and her child, after the trial they disappeared from public record. Myra’s fate haunted me. So, I decided to search for her. Over the past thirty years, I’ve read thousands of passport and passenger lists, birth, death, and marriage certificates, census reports, newspaper articles, hundreds of gravestones, spent time in Cumberland and Gettysburg, and have had the most fascinating on-going correspondence with the famed host of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots”, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr.– who may or may not be my cousin. This search, which has been both mundane and at times marvelously mystical, inspired me to write a cycle of songs.
The Cumberland Suite
Some of the memorable moments ... photographed by Tony Finnerty
