All For A Song - Myra Taylor The Musical
All For a Song is a labor of love. For me, this inspirational story of Myra’s life is about more than just her. It’s about a great American City - Kansas City - its jazz, its swing, its jump and its people. It’s also about endurance, determination, winning against all odds and enduring to the final victory. Most of all it’s about music.
The play opens in 1994, as Myra, nearing her eighties, struggles to survive by cleaning floors and struggling with other indignities. Then, through a contemporary musical score, beginning with a song that moves back in time stylistically through the decades, we find ourselves in the 1940's with Myra, now young, vivacious and beautiful as she embarks on her life-long journey, touring with the USO Black Entertainers Unit during WWII and later world tours - through broken romances and personal struggles and misadventures, her recording sessions, to Korea, Vietnam, the Far East, Europe, another romance, which then brings us back to the opening scene of the show. From there we move forward to the present, through more successes and disappointments, including her successful fight to recover copyright ownership to her songs. Myra returns to the city of her birth, where, now embraced by her community, she reclaims her life, one song at a time, and in doing so, achieves one more final moment of glory as a headline performer and “Poster Girl” for the 2001 Kansas City Jazz and Blues Festival.
Alessandro De Gaetano
Myra with Harland Leonard Band Myra & Emmylou Harris Myra Taylor - "My Night to Dream"