The Jazz at Lincoln Center co-founder, still a critic at 97, shows a love of improvisational speech in these early essays, which I found via James Marcus of Harper's magazine. Murray was the Cornel West of his day, a public intellectual who deals street-corner jive to hilarious effect. Here he's nominally on a Southern road trip to interview other writers for Harper's, but mostly he's doing the dozens on his establishment subjects, or offering mock-grudging praise: Robert Penn Warren he compares to a Telegraph Road mechanic for his "pretty-goodness." The actual interviews are genteel and barely alluded to amid a series of Murray rants: He sells woof tickets but isn't taking buyers, or will not admit his subjects might be droll in their own ofay way. Finally at his high-school and college haunts Murray yields the floor to his peers, who seem to have been given much wit because much is expected of them. Murray's editor didn't know what to make of this brand of "outrageous nonsense" in 1971 but now it's a hipper trip than "Soul Train" ever charted. Even now Murray's nonstop patter comes off as what comedians call "too smart for the room." That phrase also came to mind once when I heard Dan Quayle tell political jokes to an outside-the-Beltway crowd. Murray seems to think of his "Old South" subjects as we do George H.W. Bush's maladroit vice president: A cutting contest would be unfair. And Murray would kill.