Philly. A Novel - Joseph Holder

Philadelphia, 1971. Wilson Simmons sings four nights a week at a small club on South Street and works the loading docks on the Delaware by day. He has a voice that makes rooms go still - and a belief, held quietly for twenty years, that the gift was given to the wrong person.

When A&R man Gerald Price walks into the club and places a card on the bar, Wilson is closer to the thing he has always wanted than he has ever been. And more afraid. Then he meets Diane Cole - a Philadelphia Uplift Coalition organizer who asks him the question no one has ever asked: what is your music for? He doesn't have an answer. Not yet.

Set against the rise of Philadelphia International Records and the birth of the Philly Sound, PHILLY is a period romantic drama about a self-doubting soul singer who finds purpose - and the courage to use his extraordinary voice - through his love for a fierce civil rights organizer who refuses to let him shrink. It is a story about what it costs to carry a gift you don't believe you deserve, and what happens when someone refuses to let you waste it.From the rowhouses of North Philadelphia to the recording studios of Broad Street and the stage of the Tower Theater, PHILLY moves with the intimacy of literary fiction and the emotional sweep of the music that made a city legendary.