Redmond, Eugene B. Drumvoices: The Mission of
Afro-American Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor
Books, 1976.
Wilfred D. Samuels
Train Whistle Guitar Albert Murray (1974)
In 1974 ALBERT MURRAY introduced readers to
Scooter, his sidekick Little Buddy Marshall, and
Gasoline Point, Alabama, in his novel Train Whis-
tle Guitar, which, published to wide acclaim, won
the Lillian Smith Award for Southern Fiction. De-
parting from the traditional bildungsroman, Train
Whistle Guitar successfully combines the novel
form with the aesthetics of BLUES and jazz as a way
to look at African-American life of the 1920s. Mur-
ray created the fictional world of Gasoline Point
to address what he identified as the “folklore of
white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathol-
ogy.” Absent in this novel are the explicit stresses
and dilemmas of racial oppression and its impact
on black life. Instead Murray masterfully creates a
world that, much like ZORA NEALE HURSTON’s Ea-
tonville in THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, cel-
ebrates the richness of the black folk community
and the power of the black vernacular tradition.
Throughout the novel, the celebration of the
blues aesthetic is apparent in the way that the story
weaves music into the lives and individual stories
of the supporting characters, such as Stagolee
Dupas, Claiborne Williams, Miss Blue Eula Bacote,
sisters Lucinda Wiggins and Miss Libby Lee Tay-
lor, and most notably blues man Luzana Cholly.
It is in the moments of the “also and also” of the
novel, where words just are not enough to capture
the meaning and the message, that the narrator
uses music to convey meaning. Deeply rooted in
the storyteller tradition, the novel progresses in
episodic sequences that follow Scooter and Little
Buddy through a variety of adventures as they pre-
tend to explore deep into the realm of boyhood
imagination, through which they travel into the
swamp where they discover a dead body, try train
hopping with Luzana Cholly, and even experience
adolescent love.
Considered a classic of contemporary literature,
Train Whistle Guitar, Murray maintains, is not a
story solely for African Americans but a story that
speaks to anyone who can sit back and appreci-
ate the experience of the journey and the magi-
cal sound of a train whistle being played out on a
guitar and the stories that could be told from those
memories. It is a story about seeking individual
identity within a communal spirit.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carson, Warren. “Albert Murray: Literary Recon-
struction of the Vernacular Community.” African
American Review 27, no. 2 (1993): 287–295.
Murray, Albert, and Roberta S. Maguire. Conversa-
tions with Albert Murray. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 1997.
Schultz, Elizabeth. “Albert L. Murray.” In Dictionary of
Literary Biography. Vol. 38: Afro-American Writers
after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, edited by
Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 214–224,
Detroit: Gale, 1985.
Terry Bozemantrickster
“Eshu, the Trickster, will meet you at the Thresh-
old. He stands there in the crossroads between
power and fear” (Nalo Hopkinson, Mojo). The
term trickster, which first appeared in print in
1711 to refer to someone who practices trickery
(a rogue, cheat, knave), had its literary debut in
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1741). The term
was later applied to figures from oral tradition by
anthropologist Daniel Brinton in his 1868 study
of Native American mythology (161–162) and is
today used by anthropologists in reference to simi-
lar ethnological phenomena from cultures world-
wide, as well as by critics in regard to characters
in literature. Religious historians, anthropologists,
folklorists, and psychologists have been keenly in-
terested in trickster figures (Carroll, 105). Mythic
trickster stories have traditionally explained phe-
nomena such as the human acquisition of fire and
the earth’s creation or re-creation after the flood,504 Train Whistle Guitar