Train Whistle Guitar

by Albert Murray

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

Genres: Fiction, American, Historical Fiction, African American, Novels

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Robert Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Steve]

Scooter—I never got his entire name—recounts his early life, comings and goings, in Gasoline Point, Alabama. The repressive African American experience, religion, family, friendships, sights, sounds, a partial corpse, a murder and lost cherries all figure through this elegant work. I thought Uncle Jerome’s grammar advice worth noting:

A noun is someone or something; a pronoun is anything or anybody; a verb is tells and does and is; an adverb is anyhow, anywhere, anytime; an adjective is number and nature; a preposition is relationship; and conjunction is membership; and interjection is the spirit of energy.

I liked the way Mr. Murray hinted at revelations several times in this work, then leaving me to wonder without further explanation. What exactly did Luzana Cholly tell Scooter and his friend, Little Buddy Marshall, about the chain gang and the penitentiary, for example.

[Richard Derus · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 that he now has permission to make up dialogue and go into the inner life of his characters a little more.

Starting out with two strikes against it, that of coming-of-age (really, isn't that vein played out?) story and that of fiction following memoir (almost always the memoir is better), I was prepared to be disappointed. Perhaps that's one big reason why I was. But honestly, truly, and with all my heart, I tried to like this book. I like Mr. Murray's non-fiction (The Omni-Americans, Stomping the Blues). I wish he'd stayed in that genre, or come all the way away from it and not used his memoir's material as the subject of his fiction. It just does not come off well in comparison.

SO too bad.

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

End-of-Year 'Loose Ends Bother Me' Microreview in Three Sentences or Less:

I’ve no issue with dialect, in fact I find it often physicalizes, puts musculature to a novel when deployed with good craft and better cause. That said, Train Whistle Guitar’s cyclopean focus on capturing the essence of Blues music in a textual counterpart can’t help but fail. Trust me—I’m the kid that almost died trying to catch Krautrock in a bottle.

Rating: 3.4532718

[Sabrina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not my cup of tea. The writing is fine but not for me. The "story" is really just a bunch of disjointed ramblings about the community and people in a small town in Alabama in what sounds like the 1920's or 1930's. Most of it is written as if it was auto-generated by someone of the time speaking, with all the misspellings and chopped/dropped letters of someone with an accent and little schooling of the time/place/circumstance/culture. Lots of swearing which you don't expect from a character who most of the time in the book is a small child.

[Tatjana · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 being the other and I'm aware of the other nearby. I listen to the stories people are telling (which isn't hard working in a library), but hear the music within them.

I can't wait to read the next book. This book is *my* Twilight.

[Sally Boots · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[h. · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Andrea Badgley · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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 full of blues and jazz, as well as gospel.

[Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[William Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

If William Faulkner had written Huckleberry Finn, this would be it. Murray’s 1974 semi-autobiographical novel is the rambling story of a boy growing up in Gasoline Point, Alabama in the 1920s. Smart, ambitious and dirt-poor, the boy was interested above all in music, so we get some fine descriptions of musicians of that period, such as the fictional avuncular guitarist Luzana Cholly (who we can guess was “Charlie from Louisiana”). The vernacular language is far more understandable than Mark Twain’s difficult-to-read rendition.

This volume is the first in Murray’s series that includes “The Spyglass Tree” and “Seven League Boots.” In this one, the boy, “Scooter,” is about eleven at the start and for most of the book, but very quickly grows up in the last quarter to adolescence. He and his best buddy, “Buddy,” do little-boy things like climb trees skip school, smoke cigarettes, discover a dead body, and sneak into music performances.

The book is compelling and hard to put down for reasons I can’t explain. There is very little character development even at the end when Scooter suddenly matures, and there is no “plot,” or even any coherent unfolding of a causal sequence. It’s a concatenation of anecdotes and scenes, but somehow it not only hangs together, it flows. I’d have to study it a lot more to figure out how Murray did that. I think it’s the strong and consistent voice.

“Papa himself never talked about white people as such. But sometimes when they were talking about hard times, somebody would get him to tell about some of the things he had seen and done during those times when he had to go off somewhere and pass for white to get a job. Buddy said…Everybody say, don’t care how much of his skin and his keen nose and his flat ass Mister Whit might have got from the whitefolks, he got his mother-wit from the getting place.” (p. 61)

I love, “got it from the getting place.” The writing can also be stop-and-re-read beautiful.

“There was a blueness which went with the odor of caulking tar and turpentine and which was to twine and tarpaulin what steel blue was to rawhide; and it went with Mobile because it was a seaport blue, which was that infinite color of horizons beyond harbors and salt foam, that compass and spyglass blue against which gulls circled and soared…” (p 41)

“Compass and spyglass blue…” wow. And the prose often turns deeply philosophical, but miraculously, not in a way that bumps you out of the little-boy voice.

“That was when Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy called it red murder, and that was how Bea Ella Thornhill became Red Ella from then on …But Little Buddy and I knew that Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy had said red because what he was really talking about was the blues… not knowing that bad luck and disappointment meant not the end of the world but only that being human you had to suffer like everybody else…” (p. 122)

This is immersion into a world we should know more about.

Murray, Albert (1974). Train Whistle Guitar. New York: McGraw-Hill, 183 pp.

[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in grad school for a class I took on literature inspired by the blues, but I have absolutely no memory of reading it (though I clearly did; there's the marginalia to prove it LOL), so reading it now was like reading it for the first time.

I don't think I can say enough positive things about about this novel. It is so evocative of time and place, and the way the novel is crafted with the conventions of the blues (the call and response, the repetition) grounds it even further in the African American culture of the Deep South following World War I when Jim Crow is king and Prohibition casts a dangerous pall over so many communities.

This is a coming of age story, a boy's story, and it's absolutely lovely. Highly recommended.

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

A coming of age story that deserves to be more well-known than it is. Beautiful and poetic writing like in this description of an old clock:

"...because it hickory dickory docked and clocked like a brass spoon metronome above the steel blue syncopation of guitar string memories; because it hockey-tock rocked to jangle like such honky tonk piano mallets as echo midnight freight train distances beyond patch-quilt horizons and bedside windowpanes."

[Slagle Rock · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. I appreciated the characters, dialogue, drama, scenes and landscapes presented, as they offered insight into the author’s experiences growing up in Birmingham, Ala., during the 1920s but the chapters seemed more like standalone reads about a related cast of characters rather than forming the whole takeaway experience that is expected from a novel.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Carla A · Rating 4 out of 5]

I see why this might not be relatable but in many ways it reminded me of As Brave As You by Jason Reynolds all be it much griter and the Reynolds book only spans one summer rather than from a child to an young adult (25 yrs or so I think) that the Murray book covers. Not something you can pick up and read for 10 minutes but for me once I could commit and get into the flow I really loved it. Albert Murray was amazing.

[Professor Typewriter · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a shame that no speaks of the greatness of Albert Murray’s writing. This is a good novel. A straight and complete coming-of-age work. Simply stunning.

[David Hesson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Authentic and real coming of age in Depression era Alabama.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murray has a great poetic rhythm in his prose, with a tinge of stream-of-consciousness.
Enjoyed this one.
(I own this in the Library of America edition, along with a couple other novels & poetry)

[Rita · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 just by their parents, but by the entire community. What a very rich way to grow up.

Second, the great extent to which the 12/14-year-old main character is exposed to oral teachings. He seemingly spends hours a day listening to grown-ups talking, whether it's at the barbershop, in his parents' living room or in summer on their porch, church events, or a local hall where guitarists practice their music. Murray shows us how very important all this learning was in forming his thoughts and opinions.

Murray writes in the adolescent boy's voice, so the text is full of colloquial speech -- sometimes I had to guess at the meaning, but Murray clearly wanted the reader to follow, so he keeps to a middle road between 'standard' English and the English of his home town neighborhood.

We get vignettes of a couple dozen folks, and more on a handful that Scooter [main character's nickname] and Little Buddy admired and spent more time with.

122:
"...what Coleman had said was Bea Ella Thornhill's biggest mistake of all: Not knowing that bad luck and disappointment meant not the end of the world but only that being human you had to suffer like everybody else from time to time.
...
Her last word on everything was always: God doesn't love ugly and doesn't care too much about pretty either."

We know from Albert Murray's excellent write-up of Count Basie's autobiography how very much he [Murray] knows about jazz and blues music. This book shows how deep Murray's roots in music were in childhood, all the time he and his friend spent talking and listening to the local guitar players/singers.

96:
"...The one thing you were never likely to hear Mama, Miss Sister Lucinda Wiggins or any other church folks humming, ...singing, or even listening to...back in those days was blues music....According to every preacher who ever mentioned it, the blues was the music of the Devil...."

This is explained is much more detail. I never stopped to think that this would be true, but yes.
By the way, the title: I thought first there should be commas in it. But "train whistle" is the way the boys in the book describe the special sound made by their favorite guitar player.

Now I want to read the other two volumes of this trilogy, as well as Murray's memoirs "South to a Very Old Place".

[Vel Veeter]

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 Ellison, and especially from his long correspondence with Murray. The two were college friends and kept up letter writing and friendship for about 40 years. That book tells us that it faded toward the end, but I specifically recall when Ellison read and gave notes for this novel, or rather for pieces of writing that split off between this novel and a previous novel. Ellison was incredibly enthusiastic (but not in any kind of fake way --- Ellison would not be able to pull that off). So the novel takes place in a fictional Alabama town as two young boys go off looking for adventure. The language is dialect heavy throughout, but also informed by a kind of improvised, musicality that sends it off into multiple directions at times, full of repetition, local color ala Mark Twain, and clearly linked to African-American folk tales and oral culture that I've only read some about in works by Henry Louis Gates or Zora Neale Hurston. So I found the book outside my experience (and certainly outside my expertise) and at times frustrating. But, what do I know?

[Barbara Rhine · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 would be a chore, and instead it was a keen pleasure, in every vignette. So glad to find, through Claudia Rankine's recommendation, this author hitherto unknown to me!

[Itasca Community Library]

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.

[Charles Weaver · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Paul Jellinek · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Tracy]

Enjoyed it especially for the language of the time.

[Joe M · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars, actually.