South to a Very Old Place

by Albert Murray

The highly acclaimed novelist and biographer Albert Murray tells his classic memoir of growing up in Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s in South to a Very Old Place.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Classics, African American, History, Biography

266 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

Reviews

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

AM was one cool cat, yo. Damn smart too, wrote prose like Charlie Parker bee-bopped & shredded misconceptions from all sides of racial divide while holding strong to the values that brought his peeps into mainstream legit demands for recognition of merit accomplishment. No DEI copout around then, which is NOT to say DEI [in theory] is a not policy worth pursuing, just as AA had a place and time where it selectively worked. But, so, mainly he wanted excellence to be the standard by which black folks would gain their rightful place in any arena where they competed, and he cites beaucoup examples herein. He makes good fun of white folks .. 'seed-store feed-store peckerwoods' and called their shit, shit. I love it! He dug Walker Percy, his work, but called out his uncle (WP's) for racist bullshit. He also said Faulkner was da man of southern lit. authentic. Flannery O'Conner too. He knew his music writing several books touting big band, blues & jazz legends as well as back door plunkers. I hope to read all his books if I can find them. Whatever my own racial hangups are or might be it's cats like HE da man that whittle my stick. Amen.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Murray is an under-appreciated American master and while South to a Very Old Place is not his best work it is a good, and at times great, digressive memoir. Murray was born and raised in Alabama but tagged as one of the Talented Tenth by the African-American community in which he was raised. Well-educated and weighted with the burdens of the expectations of a race Murray became a scholar, military officer, civil rights advocate, novelist and jazz critic. Murray writes with wisdom: "...the only thing worth inheriting is humanity." About his own education, speaking of the South in the 20s and 30s: "from junior high school on having an education was as dangerous as it was precious." Friend to Romare Bearden and Ralph Ellison, with whom he collaborated, and various jazz greats, Murray occupies a prominent place in 20th century American arts and letters. Personally, I wish the memoir was more direct and less literary (in addition to Ellison, Murray’s literary heroes include Faulkner and Joyce). Techniques that work well when done well in a novel don’t seem to be as successful, even if done well, in a memoir. Still, lesser Murray is pretty good and the life he writes about, and yet lives (he is past 95), a rich and fascinating one. He is open-minded with a great range of interests and a sharp eye for America's strengths and weaknesses, observing "to be conscious of dissimilarities is not necessarily to be divided by them." In Murray, dissimilarities come together into a brilliant cultural mind and national identity. In others, well that is their choice to opt for division and diminishment. Reading Albert Murray informs and connects, pulling together the diverse threads of our greatness.

[Joe Miguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtakingly good. Murray is to words what Coltrane or Duke were to music. If you love great writing and want to learn some deep, hard truths about the question of race in America, this book is a must-read.

[Stephen Rynkiewicz]

The Jazz at Lincoln Center co-founder, still a critic at 97, shows a love of improvisational speech in these early essays, which I found via James Marcus of Harper's magazine. Murray was the Cornel West of his day, a public intellectual who deals street-corner jive to hilarious effect. Here he's nominally on a Southern road trip to interview other writers for Harper's, but mostly he's doing the dozens on his establishment subjects, or offering mock-grudging praise: Robert Penn Warren he compares to a Telegraph Road mechanic for his "pretty-goodness." The actual interviews are genteel and barely alluded to amid a series of Murray rants: He sells woof tickets but isn't taking buyers, or will not admit his subjects might be droll in their own ofay way. Finally at his high-school and college haunts Murray yields the floor to his peers, who seem to have been given much wit because much is expected of them. Murray's editor didn't know what to make of this brand of "outrageous nonsense" in 1971 but now it's a hipper trip than "Soul Train" ever charted. Even now Murray's nonstop patter comes off as what comedians call "too smart for the room." That phrase also came to mind once when I heard Dan Quayle tell political jokes to an outside-the-Beltway crowd. Murray seems to think of his "Old South" subjects as we do George H.W. Bush's maladroit vice president: A cutting contest would be unfair. And Murray would kill.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

"You readily concede that formulations generalized from scientific-research findings may be nets with a closer weave, still not only do they remain nets, but at best they trap even smaller areas of experience than literary configurations, expressly because they are in a narrower weave. As with what Kenneth Burke calls 'trained incapacity,' scientific insight may be more sharply focused but its field of vision is likely to be correspondingly more limited."

[Salvatore · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most memoir of memoirs. A series of images, ideas, improvisation, revolving around locations that the author lives in, grew up in, travelled through. It can be a bit of a slog, since at times there seemed to be little logic, to be much interjection without the most obvious of logic. However, it was like listening to a jazz piece. Refrains occasionally anchored the work, which sometimes meandered into places you wouldn't suspect.

[Elizabeth]

As seen in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...

[ddip]

Mentioned in Imani Perry's "South to America." I loved Murray's memoir/novel "Train Whistle Guitar" about growing up in the South (Alabama). He's a gifted writer.

[Katie Pruden · Rating 3 out of 5]

#46
Research for my capstone

[Rita · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read Aug 2015. Is very different than I imagined it. It is billed as an autobiography, but does not appear to me to fit that category much at all.

Back around 1969 or 1970 Murray got paid by a periodical to travel around the South and write something about it. This book [c 1971] is an account of those travels [only a couple of weeks, I think], perhaps the most interesting being his visit to where he grew up outside Mobile, Alabama. Most of the other visits he was making appointments to speak to literary figures of the day, more white than black, and trying to get a handle on their 'racial attitudes', for lack of a better term.

Murray writes in a self-conscious style that is over my head. He wants to write like jazz, and uses all kinds of expressions that I don't know the meaning of - some colloquial, some referring to people or music or works that are not familiar to me.
He tries, I think, to be optimistic about the future -- making some move towards a time when race will be less of an issue than it is/was.

An interesting recurring debate is whether [conservative] white Southerners are actually 'better' at doing race than well-meaning white Northerners. This is important, and it frustrates me not being able to figure out just what he means when he discusses this.

[Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

My essay on South to a Very Old Place: http://studiowmuyumba.blogspot.com/20...