The Lost Sessions

The songs you know by heart were written by men whose names were never allowed to appear on the label.

In 2023, Smithsonian researcher Sarah Rivers is digitizing music archives from the 1960s when she finds something that shouldn't exist: a memo. One page. Specific names, specific songs, specific instructions for how to make sure certain people never received credit for what they created.

The songs on that memo are now classics. The artists who wrote them died unknown.

What follows is an investigation that reaches back sixty years - through smoky recording studios, congressional hearings that went nowhere, anonymous letters that were never answered, and a network of musicians, lawyers, and industry insiders who tried to expose the theft and were systematically destroyed for it. The deeper Sarah goes, the clearer the picture becomes: this wasn't industry negligence. It was infrastructure. Built deliberately, maintained carefully, and profitable enough that people are still protecting it.

The Lost Sessions is historical fiction as forensic investigation - the story of what American music actually cost, and who paid for it.

For readers of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King, and anyone who has ever wondered why the most powerful voices of an era are so rarely the ones history remembers.