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. Intermingling remembrances of youth with engaging conversation, African-American folklore, and astute cultural criticism, it is at once an intimate personal journey and an incisive social history, informed by "the poet's language, the novelist's sensibility, the essayist's clarity, the jazzman's imagination, the gospel singer's depth of feeling" (The New Yorker). "His perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor and its tenacious hold on the intellect...[It] destroys some fashionable socio-political interpretations of growing up black."--Toni Morrison, The New York Times Book Review

Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth. In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains one of the key goals of the book: to open up to scrutiny the literary and cultural practice that has come to be known as “regionalism.” Part I, “Surveying the Territory,” theorizes definitions of place and region, and includes an analysis of southern literary regionalism from the 1930s to the present and an exploration of southern popular culture. In “Mapping the Region,” essayists examine different representations of rural landscapes and small towns, cities and suburbs, as well as liminal zones in which new immigrants make their homes. Reflecting the contributors’ transatlantic perspective, “Making Global Connections” challenges notions of southern distinctiveness by reading the region through the comparative frameworks of Southern Italy, East Germany, Latin America, and the United Kingdom and via a range of texts and contexts—from early reconciliation romances to Faulkner’s fictions about race to the more recent parody of southern mythmaking, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. Together, these essays explore the roles that economic, racial, and ideological tensions have played in the formation of southern identity through varying representations of locality, moving regionalism toward a “new place” in southern studies.

Rediscover the “most important book on black-white relationships” in America in a special 50th anniversary edition introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Walker Percy) “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people . . . Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.” These words, written by Albert Murray at the height of the Black Power movement, cut against the grain of their moment, and announced the arrival of a major new force in American letters. In his 1970 classic The Omni-Americans, Murray took aim at protest writers and social scientists who accentuated the “pathology” of race in American life. Against narratives of marginalization and victimhood, Murray argued that black art and culture, particularly jazz and blues, stand at the very headwaters of the American mainstream, and that much of what is best in American art embodies the “blues-hero tradition”—a heritage of grace, wit, and inspired improvisation in the face of adversity. Reviewing The Omni-Americans in 1970, Walker Percy called it “the most important book on black-white relationships . . . indeed on American culture . . . published in this generation.” As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. makes clear in his introduction, Murray’s singular poetic voice, impassioned argumentation, and pluralistic vision have only become more urgently needed today.

In this classic work of American music writing, renowned critic Albert Murray argues beautifully and authoritatively that “the blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance.” In Stomping the Blues Murray explores its history, influences, development, and meaning as only he can. More than two hundred vintage photographs capture the ambiance Murray evokes in lyrical prose. Only the sounds are missing from this lyrical, sensual tribute to the blues.

Born in 1928 in the small coastal town of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, Genevieve "Sister" Peterkin grew up with World War II bombing practice in her front yard, deep-sea fishing expeditions, and youthful rambles through the lowcountry. She shared her bedroom with a famous ghost and an impatient older sister. But most of all she listened. She absorbed the tales of her talented mother and her beloved friend, listened to the stories of the region's older residents, some of them former slaves, who were her friends, neighbors, and teachers. In this new edition she once again shares with readers her insider's knowledge of the lowcountry plantations, gardens, and beaches that today draw so many visitors. Beneath the humor, hauntings, and treasures of local history, she tells another, deeper story—one that deals with the struggle for racial equality in the South, with the sometimes painful adventures of marriage and parenthood, and with inner struggles for faith and acceptance. This edition includes a new foreword by coastal writer and researcher Lee G. Brockington and a new afterword by coauthor and lowcountry novelist William P. Baldwin.

In this visionary book, Murray takes an audacious new look at black music and, in the process, succeeds in changing the way one reads literature. Murray's subject is the previously unacknowledged kinship between fiction and the blues. Both, he argues, are virtuoso performances that impart information, wisdom, and moral guidance to their audiences; both place a high value on improvisation; and both fiction and the blues create a delicate balance between the holy and the obscene, essential human values and cosmic absurdity. Encompassing artists from Ernest Hemingway to Duke Ellington, and from Thomas Mann to Richard Wright, The Hero and the Blues pays homage to a new black aesthetic.

“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic

His schoolteacher, the barber, older girls, and a train-hopping musician teach Scooter just about all he needs to know in Gasoline Point, Alabama, during the 1920s.

The Magic Keys winningly evokes the coming to maturity of one of the great characters in contemporary American literature: Scooter, the central protagonist of Albert Murray’ s highly acclaimed autobiographical novels Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, and The Seven League Boots. Growing up brilliant and curious in Alabama, Scooter was told he was destined for greatness. Now newly married and a graduate student in humanities at New York University, he goes about discovering just what he is destined to be great at. Anchored by Eunice, his “Mrs. Me,” Scooter makes the rounds of Manhattan’ s libraries, jazz hangouts, galleries, skyscrapers, and endlessly fascinating streets, meeting the people who will help him find his way: dapper Taft Edison, who is setting their down-home dialect onto the pages of his novel-in-progress; Joe States, a drummer who brings old expectations to Scooter’s new life; and Jewel Templeton, no longer his girl but still a believer. When his budding career takes him back to Alabama, Scooter discovers both the promise of everyday bliss and intimations of adventures to come. In his inimitably musical, ardent prose, Murray captures the joyful rhythms of youth and the pulse of life at the moment when everything seems possible, in an exhilarating, tender, and masterfully crafted novel.

Conversations with Albert Murray edited by Roberta S. Maguire As a cultural critic, biographer, essayist, and novelist, Albert Murray has had a wide-ranging and profound influence on American art in the decades since the Second World War. Artists as diverse as Walker Percy, Romare Bearden, and Wynton Marsalis have drawn from Murray and his ideas on jazz and the blues, modern consciousness, and the role of race in the American identity. His own works include The Hero and the Blues, Train Whistle Guitar, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as Told to Albert Murray, The Spyglass Tree, The Blue Devils of Nada, and The Seven Leagues Boots. Yet this is the first book devoted to Murray himself, and fittingly it is based on the kind of conversations that have proven indispensable to his friends in the arts. It brings together twenty interviews with Murray conducted over the last twenty-four years, beginning with an interview shortly after his second book, South to a Very Old Place, was published, and ending with a previously unpublished interview with Roberta S. Maguire. In these conversations Murray discusses those who influenced him-Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington-and tells how they helped him develop a philosophy of art based on the blues as well as a new archetype of the American hero, the blues hero. This collection reveals a man who enjoys a good time and a good conversation, a man whose intellectual improvisations move over such subjects as his reminiscences about his native South, his insights about regional culture, and commentaries about the contemporary American scene. Roberta S. Maguire teaches English at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh