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Train Whistle Guitar
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Set in 1920s Alabama, this novel follows the life of a young boy and the lessons he learns in school, at Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy's barbershop, and from Luzana Cholly, a gun-toting guitar player.
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Paperback, 192 pages
Published
November 24th 1998
by Vintage
(first published 1974)
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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,
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Rating: 2.875* of five
The Book Report: Coming of age as an African-American lad in 1920s Alabama. Lightly fictionalized version of the author's memoir, SOUTH TO A VERY OLD PLACE, which is superb and should have been left alone.
My Review: Not a novel. Just not. It's too much like the memoir for me to buy the novel designation. Murray writes beautiful sentences, goodness knows, but his choice to call this fiction is disingenuous. The only thing that really separates this from his earlier memoir is ...more
The Book Report: Coming of age as an African-American lad in 1920s Alabama. Lightly fictionalized version of the author's memoir, SOUTH TO A VERY OLD PLACE, which is superb and should have been left alone.
My Review: Not a novel. Just not. It's too much like the memoir for me to buy the novel designation. Murray writes beautiful sentences, goodness knows, but his choice to call this fiction is disingenuous. The only thing that really separates this from his earlier memoir is ...more

Oct 13, 2008
Tatjana
rated it
it was amazing
Recommends it for:
people who can listen.
Shelves:
fiction-general,
favorites
I love this book.
This is one of those little gems someone recommends to you off the cuff where it ends up changing your life. Yeah. I was on a pretty drama-riddled holiday and this book... this book made the holiday good. This book took me to a different place, with a different beat. I felt a subtle shift in me. The shift, in this case, was to look through newly opened eyes.
I can't say that I was suddenly cool or magically got some hipness. I'm still nerdly and annoying... but I am aware of bei ...more
This is one of those little gems someone recommends to you off the cuff where it ends up changing your life. Yeah. I was on a pretty drama-riddled holiday and this book... this book made the holiday good. This book took me to a different place, with a different beat. I felt a subtle shift in me. The shift, in this case, was to look through newly opened eyes.
I can't say that I was suddenly cool or magically got some hipness. I'm still nerdly and annoying... but I am aware of bei ...more

Train Whistle Guitar: Step into the lyrical thought stream of Scooter, an African-American growing up in Alabama in the 1920s. In his breathless, artless kid-voice, he talks about bootleggers, rednecks, scandals, war, baseball, love, trains, family and music, all in an impressionistic medley of stories that somehow end up forming a growing-up tale. This is the most musical narrative writing I have read in a long time.

Set in 1920s Gasoline Point, Alabama, a fictitious town based on author Albert Murray’s hometown of Magazine Point, Train Whistle Guitar is a coming of age story of Scooter, a young black boy who with his friend Little Buddy, learns about life by hopping a train, wandering the woods, listening to grownups at garden fences and fireside circles, hiding underfoot at the barbershop, or perching in trees at night to watch dancing in the jook joint. In each of these settings, Murray not only captures
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Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray
Scooter and his friend Little Buddy Marshall live in Gasoline Point, Alabama where they run together and both admire the gun toting, guitar playing Luzana Cholly. So much so they plan on hopping freight trains and traveling around like him until Luzana catches them and sends them back home to learn about life from their kin, school rooms, barbershops, churches and honky tonks.
This is a semi-autobiographical fiction coming of age tale which reminds me of Jack ...more
Scooter and his friend Little Buddy Marshall live in Gasoline Point, Alabama where they run together and both admire the gun toting, guitar playing Luzana Cholly. So much so they plan on hopping freight trains and traveling around like him until Luzana catches them and sends them back home to learn about life from their kin, school rooms, barbershops, churches and honky tonks.
This is a semi-autobiographical fiction coming of age tale which reminds me of Jack ...more

Aug 12, 2011
h.
rated it
it was amazing
Recommends it for:
Lovers of Joyce, lovers of Nabakov, lovers of TKAM, people of exceptional taste, poets
Recommended to h. by:
Dr. Keith Clark
Shelves:
my-fives-exceptional-reads
Possibly one of the most under-rated masterpieces of the 20th century. When I added this there were only 46 Goodreads ratings and 2 reviews!! Impossible to describe, but look it up. I hate it that such an excellent read has yet to make it into the hands of exceptional readers.

My essay on Albert Murray's genius: http://studiowmuyumba.blogspot.com/20...
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This is one of those books that I can't entirely tell if I liked all that much, but also that if you told it was actually really good, I would believe you. It's not entirely that it was "over my head" so much is outside of my experience, especially in terms of language and style, that I didn't find it as joyous to read as a lot of other readers seem to. That said, it's clearly up to something impressive that I cannot deny it. So I came upon this book from reading the Collected Letters of Ralph E
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This wasn't a smooth read, kind of choppy at times, but I did find the dialect and story interesting and was hard to put down. I thought it was going to be more of a blues novel than it was, I will say it inspired me to keep writing in the Old South, back when the Blues were king.
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1974.
Makes me mad when I discover an author so good I should have heard of him decades ago.
Albert Murray's work should be on lists of 100 best authors of USA. WHY ISN"T HE???
Murray in this largely autobiographical [?] book shows me an Alabama community I would never have had access to without him.
The most unusual aspect of Murray's 1920s childhood near Mobile in this small Alabama town [the black neighborhood of the town, to be precise] is the great extent to which children are/were raised not j ...more
Makes me mad when I discover an author so good I should have heard of him decades ago.
Albert Murray's work should be on lists of 100 best authors of USA. WHY ISN"T HE???
Murray in this largely autobiographical [?] book shows me an Alabama community I would never have had access to without him.
The most unusual aspect of Murray's 1920s childhood near Mobile in this small Alabama town [the black neighborhood of the town, to be precise] is the great extent to which children are/were raised not j ...more

This book is a coming-of-age novel about an African American boy in the Jim Crow south, and as such, it is the best I have ever read. Murry manages to depict black life under what we now know were very oppressive conditions as joyfully complex, rather than simply miserable. And his rendition of black dialect is such an improvement over the "dem," "dose," "dere" (for them, those, there) approach of the mainstream (often white) authors such as Mark Twain. I thought reading Train Whistle Guitar wou
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It took me a couple of chapters to get into this one, but once I did, I was hooked. A coming-of-age story set in southern Alabama, "Train Whistle Guitar" is an honest-to-God blues disguised as a novel.
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Jun 06, 2015
Tracy
added it
Enjoyed it especially for the language of the time.

Sweet coming-of-age tale in the Deep South. Murray's characters are richly drawn and clearly inspired from his own childhood.
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