Remake the Song by Flo Fitzpatrick

Remake the Song

Flo Fitzpatrick

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Blurb:

2025: Shiloh Meridien teaches dance, dates, roams flea markets and is relatively happy. But she’s harbored a life-long love for singer Marcus Kennedy, and, when given the opportunity to travel back in time to try and save him from a killer, Shiloh grabs it.

1975: Marcus Kennedy sings and protests for causes. He rescues Shiloh as she experiences a strange post-traumatic event, instantly falling for the dancer, but pushes her away after he’s diagnosed with Parkinson’s. When Shiloh is attacked by the person determined to murder Marcus, destroying her dreams of dancing professionally, she must choose whether to return to the pleasant certainty of her original future or fight to win back Marcus and remake the past.

Excerpt:

The exceedingly short vendor dressed in a bumble costume took off, mumbling in an Irish accent she was going to find refreshments. Which left me musing about a folk singer I’d fallen in love with when I was a teenager…more than fifty years ago.

Marcus Kennedy died in 1975 on his birthday at the age of twenty-seven. Was he another victim of the legendary musician’s curse? No one really could pin down the “why” although the “how” was pretty clear. Theories at the time were that his death, via a needle filled with heroin, was either accidental, although his friends vehemently stated Kennedy had always been opposed to drugs, suicide for no good reason, or murder for no good reason. Fifty years later his death was still a mystery.

An article written in the 1990s in a top music magazine brought up the suicide angle again, stating that Kennedy began experiencing Parkinson’s-like symptoms attributed to exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, where he’d sung numerous times for the troops in the late nineteen-sixties. But the reporter then went on to discuss motives for murder, mentioning more than one possible suspect, starting with the U.S. government trying to shut down his investigation into the aforementioned spraying of Agent Orange, corrupt and bigoted cops practicing racial profiling in Manhattan before the term was widely used, and a greedy real estate tycoon messing with New York landmarks, including one of Marcus’s pet projects, a veterans’ center which had once been a famous ballroom dance hall. The journalist claimed that Marcus had nailed all the “bad guys” in a song he’d planned to release as a single. Then he died. If there had ever been such a song, it died with him.

Marcus Kennedy. Born and raised in the midtown West Side area of Manhattan called Hell’s Kitchen. He could play nearly any instrument set in front of him and possessed an incredible vocal range. He snagged a record deal when he was sixteen and began releasing folk songs he’d composed himself. He was granted a full scholarship and early admission to Julliard and then, following his graduation, toured for about six months with a professional opera company throughout Europe. After witnessing America’s struggles with Civil Rights, war, poverty, pollution, and political corruption from an ocean away, he returned home to New York City. He stuck with the same record label and sang primarily for small audiences in small clubs in Greenwich Village. None of his albums hit gold or platinum while he was alive, which was mind-boggling considering how talented he was.

I’d been a twenty-year-old dancer living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when I heard the news over the radio on a bright, sunny, December sixteenth in 1975. I’d gotten to see him about four months earlier, in August, in a small theater, also in midtown. It had been a benefit concert for the Am-Vets center, which was the very space the greedy real estate tycoon wanted demolished, and coincidently, the place where Marcus’s body was found.

After hearing of his death, I became angry, devastated, and grief-stricken. I was also confused and frightened by my own reaction to the news. How could someone I’d never met impact my emotions for such an absurdly long time? Days, weeks, months, and, yes, years after his death I continued to mourn his loss.

I now stared down at the vinyl album and the liner notes. He’d included quirky new takes on old spirituals like “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?” and “Wayfaring Stranger,” an ancient Irish anti-war ballad, “Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier” (made popular during America’s Revolutionary and Civil Wars), one or two vaudeville- era tunes like “Any Time” and “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” and a beautiful French version of “Always” (Toujours) which Marcus had discovered on an album recorded in 1941 at a Paris nightclub called Café Violette.

Years later, music critics finally heaped praise on the work, lauding his courage in not following the trend of other folk and protest singers to merge into rock or pop or disco, and instead provide old songs with a fresh sound. When Marcus was asked in an interview with a major magazine why he’d chosen such a mix of “odd” musical genres, he responded, “Blame an obscure piece of poetry for the inspiration. Let me quote: The friends that have it I do wrong, whenever I remake a song, should know what issue is at stake, it is myself that I remake.”

But Marcus Kennedy never got the chance to remake.

Bio:

Flo Fitzpatrick is multi-published in mystery and romance…with a great deal of overlap between genres and usually tossing in what used to be termed paranormal activity (time travel, second sight, reincarnation) and/or humor. Her second novel (Kensington, 2005) Hot Stuff, was nominated as Best Romantic Suspense by RT Book Reviews and optioned for film. Flo earned an M.A. in Theatre and a B.F.A. in Dance, worked as a performer, choreographer, and teacher, and often set her novels in venues relating to the arts. Before Covid, she sang with a band called The Usual Suspects but now her performing is primarily dancing and singing around the living room, to the vast entertainment of her 12-year-old mixed-breed dog Juniper.