Join us for a night of music, dancing, and fun at HalleyAnna.
Like her older sister and brother, Jenni and Sterling, HalleyAnna Finlay grew up surrounded by songwriters and was destined from birth to follow a musical path. Unlike her siblings, her earliest childhood memories were not shaped inside the walls of Cheatham Street Warehouse. HalleyAnna was born in October 1986, and her parents, Kent and Diana, sold the music venue soon after in 1988. By the time the Finlays resumed their involvement with Cheatham Street Warehouse at the end of the 1990s, HalleyAnna was already approaching her teenage years.
Although she missed out on experiences like sleeping on pool tables, HalleyAnna’s early years were still rich with song. While her mother worked at a San Marcos newspaper, her father would juggle babysitting duties with songwriting sessions. She recalls an afternoon playing in the park while her dad and Slaid Cleaves wrote “Don’t Tell Me,” which Cleaves recorded on his 1997 album “No Angel Knows.” She also remembers when Terri Hendrix visited her second-grade class at DeZavala Elementary and recognized one of Hendrix’s songs as an Al Barlow original. “I was like, ‘I know the guy who wrote this song!’” she said.
HalleyAnna also grew up singing and playing guitar every Sunday at San Marcos’ First United Methodist Church. “That all kind of made music and songwriting something in my life that I just couldn’t live without,” says HalleyAnna. She started playing guitar at age 11 (after trying fiddle) and later played saxophone in her high school jazz band. “It was habitual.” Consequently, by the time she began participating in Cheatham’s songwriter nights and opening shows there for artists like Monte Montgomery, Sisters Morales, and Hendrix at age 13, performing in public wasn’t much of an obstacle.
