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Train Whistle Guitar

Albert Murray

3.81 · Rating details · 162 ratings · 18 reviews

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. ...more

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Paperback, 192 pages

Published November 24th 1998 by Vintage (first published 1974)

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Alabama Books

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Aug 20, 2013 Robert Mitchell rated it it was amazing

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, 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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Sep 20, 2011 Richard Derus rated it it was ok · review of another edition

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

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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

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Nov 28, 2011 Sally Boots rated it really liked it

Shelves: book-galaxy

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.

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Nov 15, 2013 Andrea Badgley rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: andrea-reads-america, alabama, black-authors

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 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 the feel of African American kinship within a small town in the South, but what to this white woman is the foreign experience of children who are raised not just by their parents, but by an entire community. Regardless of blood relationships, all of Scooter’s elders in Gasoline Point play the role of Auntee or Uncle.

This was perhaps my favorite element of Train Whistle Guitar, this entrée into a childhood unlike my own, where a people shared a common history, a common struggle, that brought them together into a community that was so tight-knit the barbershop men made decisions about when young boys were old enough to hear man talk. This sense of community-as-family made me think of one of the most memorable pieces of parenting advice I’ve heard: it’s important that children have adults in their lives they can turn to and trust for perspectives beyond Mom’s and Dad’s.

While Train Whistle Guitar certainly has moments and undercurrents of racial tension, the book was gentle and showed love instead of hate, eagerness instead of anger. And while Murray is skillful in evoking the Alabama bayou and the thickets that skirt it, my favorite passages are from the jook joints, places I’ve only come across in African American fiction:

“Stagolee moved over to where the piano was and put his fruit jar [of whiskey] on top of it and stood clapping his hands and snapping his fingers with the women around him doing the shimmieshewooble and the messaround.”

Murray’s language is alive with rhythm and swing, and he was able to show me an Alabama I would never have access to without him. I gave this 3 stars instead of 4 because I found it hard sometimes to follow the rhythm.

** Edited 12/9/13 to upgrade to four stars. This book is one of those that when I initially finished it I thought it was good/okay, but the more I think about it, the more I love it. It has lingered in my mind and has left a wonderful after taste, and the more I reflect on Murray's gorgeous prose, the more appreciate and admire it. So, four stars it is. ...more

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Nov 27, 2013 Jeff rated it really liked it

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

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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.

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Feb 26, 2008 Walton rated it it was amazing

My essay on Albert Murray's genius: http://studiowmuyumba.blogspot.com/20... ...more

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Jul 05, 2020 Vel Veeter rated it really liked it

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 ...more

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Jun 26, 2018 Robert rated it really liked it

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. ...more

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Aug 29, 2014 Rita rated it really liked it

Shelves: american, coming-of-age, children-youth-fiction, deep-south-usa, african-american

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

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Mar 25, 2015 Barbara Rhine rated it it was amazing

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 ...more

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Dec 10, 2015 Paul Jellinek rated it it was amazing

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. ...more

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Feb 04, 2015 Charles Weaver rated it it was amazing

This is a beautiful lyrical book. It reminded me a little of Huckleberry Finn in the way it describes the boy. A great evocation of a black community near Mobile Alabama in the period between the two world wars.

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Oct 09, 2014 Itasca Community Library added it

Shelves: reviewed-by-jeff

Jeff says:

This is a fictionalized semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale which reminds me of Jack Kerouac’s work, especially On the Road. I really enjoyed the writing as well as the story, which makes me think of old-fashioned Southern America life with its blues and jazz, as well as gospel.

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