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 sociopolitical
interpretations of growing up black."--Toni Morrison, The New York
Times Book Review