The Seven League Boots

by Albert Murray

Overview

The break-out novel by an unrecognized master--"a fictional tale spinner in the grand Southern tradition" (Washington Post Book World). Told from the point of view of a young Alabama college graduate in the 1920s, this brilliant novel recounts the exploits of a legendary jazz composer and his band on a tour that becomes a heroic journey "equivalent to the seven league strides of heroes in rocking chair story times."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307828644
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/19/2012
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Albert Murray is the author of The Omni-Americans, Stomping the Blues, The Hero and the Blues, South to a Very Old Place, Conjugations and Reiterations, and From the Briarpatch File. He is the coauthor of Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie and the coeditor of Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

The young black hero of Murray's Train Whistle Guitar and The Spyglass Tree comes of age in this ambitious and vibrant conclusion to the trilogy, set in the 1920s. Here, Scooter has been nicknamed Schoolboy, for his new college degree. A talented bass player, Schoolboy is called to join the ensemble led by the legendary and innovative Bossman. A series of one-night stands eventually takes the band to L.A. for an extended stay. Although promised to a girl back home, Schoolboy acquires two lovers there. The first, Gayneele Whitlow, an ``old down home broad,'' is a familiar fixture to the band; but it is for movie star Jewel Templeton that he takes a leave from the band. Though new to the jazz scene, Jewel becomes Schoolboy's patron, offering her home, her staff and herself in exchange for a foothold in the jazz world that fascinates her. Studio sessions and club dates keep Schoolboy busy, but the itch to be on the road returns. Even so, Jewel takes him abroad to experience Europe; it is only by leaving that continent, and her, that he learns what to come home to. Murray faithfully evokes the world of early black jazz here-as much through his prose, which soars, glides and hops in an energetic rush, as through his richly detailed evocations of various cities and landmark sites. Keenly observant and intensely curious, Schoolboy makes an engaging narrator, completing a story that, after three volumes, is as vital as the period in black American history that it evokes so well. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This novel completes a trilogy (including Train Whistle Guitar, Northeastern Univ. Pr., 1989, and The Spyglass Tree, Pantheon, 1991) that documents the education of a young black man. Upon graduation from college in the 1920s, Scooter becomes the bass player in a celebrated jazz band and proceeds through another stage of development. Section 1 ("The Apprentice") celebrates the camaraderie and inventiveness of accomplished musicians as they travel by bus throughout the country. In section 2 ("The Journeyman"), Scooter leaves the band to write music in Hollywood for the movies, and in section 3 ("The Craftsman"), he explores the expatriate culture of France. Throughout, Scooter's professional and sexual conquests seem so effortless that the novel lacks tension. Murray recounts numerous episodes but provides little plot; he includes hundreds of people but develops few engaging characters. For larger public libraries. [For a starred review of Murray's latest nonfiction, The Blue Devils of Nada, see p. 111.-Ed.]-Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville

Library Journal