A potentially superior counterpart to Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The fact that I am just now reading Albert Murray, 97 years after his birth and a month after his death, is troubling. I should have learned about him in high school, should have taken a class focused solely on his works in college and should have been talking about him with our two sons in the same conversations in which I mentioned Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Salinger, Kerouac and Twain. It isn’t the fault of the preceding giants of literature that they were white men, but it is my fault, and perhaps that of our society, that intellectuals like Murray who wrote with the same degree of artistry but offered the additional benefit of a cohesive theoretical/critical framework underpinning his work were intentionally or unintentionally relegated to the outskirts of our collective, literary consciousness like the inhabitants of Scooter’s “briarpatch,” Gasoline Point. I’m so shocked, in fact, at the apparent disparity between Train Whistle Guitar and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, justifiably accepted by most scholars as a keystone of American literature, that I’ll be re-reading Huck Finn before completing Murray’s semi-autobiographical trilogy.

My initial gut reaction, however, is that Murray’s work offers both the casual reader and the serious student everything that Huck Finn offers and much more. There is the same earthy, history-rich colloquialisms of the American South, but Murray manages to seamlessly augment them with the music-born poetry/prose we so often attribute almost exclusively to Kerouac. Twain is justifiably credited for illustrating the disparate lives of blacks and whites in the Antebellum South but inescapably does so from the perspective of those in power. Because Murray both grew up in a community like Gasoline Point and approached the story with the eye of a forensic poet, we are presented not only with the words of disenfranchised African Americans but their thoughts and the first-hand symbol-rich detail that even the most empathetic outsider would have missed. Even the flora of the first few pages speak volumes to the socioeconomic status and Nature-centric lifestyle of Gasoline Point’s residents. For an introduction to the power of plants in Murray’s work read Bert Hitchcock’s fascinating essay on the “chinaberry tree” in “Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation” edited by Barbara A. Baker. And then there is the music: the Blues which evolved and gave birth to Jazz which in turn informed Murray’s art and his theories about race in America, literature and literary criticism. Murray once said “We invented the blues. Europeans invented psychoanalysis. You invent what you need.” While my review has focused mainly on the historical and critical importance of Train Whistle Guitar, without the blues-infused emotions of the work, it wouldn't move us enough to be worth analyzing.




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