It’s about the hidden human
origin of “Taps”

The twenty-four notes that silence every crowd that hears them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Gill, the oldest of nine children of an American fighter pilot, made his literary debut with this work of historical fiction. His novel tells the story of a song—one that his brothers and sisters and all military families will come to understand when their time comes to hear it. America’s Unfinished Song was inspired by a question he asked his father as a young boy after attending his first military funeral with his father and family. “Dad, where did that song come from, and why was it played at his grave?”

Hearing those twenty-four notes for the first time and hearing no one knew the story behind what every military family prays they will never have to hear—the twenty-four notes of Taps inspired this story.

“It was a leather-bound notebook with blank pages. She had been saving it for his birthday,
which was three weeks off, but that no longer mattered. “In case you hear something worth keeping,” she said.”

Families are split from Philadelphia to Richmond and are forced to deal with the realities of an oncoming war. In a woodworker’s shop that smells of sawdust and varnish, a craftsman’s family and the people bound to them begin shaping something without meaning to — a melody passed from a five-year-old’s fingers at the piano to a guitar, to an arrangement, to voices that answer one another across a back room where two musical traditions quietly meet.

Then the war comes and changes everything: their families, their business, how they work on their composition. What survives is twenty-four notes.

America’s Unfinished Song is a story about the missing human origin of “Taps” — the bugle call that silences every crowd that hears it, whose true authorship history has never settled. Moving from a Virginia workshop to a battlefield where two armies fought one-another all day, then later that night stood still to listen. It is a novel about how a song outlives everyone who made it and how history missed it.