The Yazoo Blues - Hardcover

"Darkly comic, profound and original, The Yazoo Blues stakes out Pritchard's territory on the rough side of Southern Literature." --William Gay, author of Twilight: A Novel

"Wickedly brilliant." --Michael Ray Taylor, Nashville Scene

"In the sometimes profanely profound but always profoundly profane Junior Ray Loveblood, John Pritchard has given the Delta the kind of thorough and insightful historian it has needed for so long. If this book doesn't make you laugh a lot and maybe think at least a little, I'm guessing you're not from around here." --James C. Cobb, author of Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity

"John Pritchard has followed his first novel Junior Ray (2005) with the further adventures of his eponymous hero in The Yazoo Blues ... Pritchard, a college English teacher, belongs to the non-genteel branch of southern letters, with the profanity factor unusually high. The shock of the taboo words is softened by respelling them in a rich--and ingenious--Mississippi Delta dialect. An "R" rating still holds, however, both for the insistent rough language and for "adult" situations ... Good ol' boys and girls will have a good time." --Fred Lippincott, First Draft

"Yazoo Blues has it going full-force: lowdown high jinks (on both sides of the law), a history lesson here and there, graphic sex scenes every whichway, and equal-opportunity offensiveness (in the words of Junior Ray) on the subject of blacks, "planters," college professors, golfers, weekend hunters, bankers, "Piscob'ls," psychiatrists, Latinos, and "queers." And on top of it, there's the sound of the Delta itself, pure and simple: from "bobakew" to "bye-oh," from "gotdamn" to "litter-ture," and from "outchonda" to "Meffis," the city whose strip joint, the Magic Pussy Cabaret & Club, Junior Ray practically calls home." --Leonard Gill, Memphis Magazine

"Yazoo Blues is a hoot from start to finish. What a good time you give your readers! Of course it's funnier than throwing an egg into an electric fan. I laughed on every delicious page. This is what Twain would write if he were alive today and if he had your vision of a Delta rich in history and anti-history. He would love your unreliable narrator (a rascal and a liar) with a pure-dee passion. The book redefines the art of artful digression--it reminds me of Tristram Shandy, the original shaggy dog story, in that respect. I can't say enough how much I enjoyed myself. Yazoo Blues is one long pitch-perfect, profane prose poem. And that's only the p's." --Corey Mesler, author of We Are Billion Year Old Carbon: A 60's Narrative

"...if you liked the first book, you'll love this one. Sandwiched amongst the profanity and explicit sexual content is some of the most beautiful writing the reader is likely to encounter. Pritchard's prose and poetry is so beautiful, in fact, that it will make anyone who has ever aspired to fiction writing weep with envy. He understands the truth of the Mississippi Delta in ways only a son of the Delta can." --The Tunica Times

"In this insightful, laugh-out-loud follow-up to his debut novella, Junior Ray, Pritchard again indulges the profanely backwoods, occasionally backwards, voice of Mississippi "good ol' boy" Junior Ray Loveblood. Each interwoven story is as surprising and strong as Junior Ray himself, who conjures a surreal scene of ironclads logjammed in a bayou as colorfully as he recounts a backroom lap dance from his best friend's granddaughter Petunia. Between expletives and misanthropic digressions, Junior Ray reveals a lifetime of deep, unlikely friendships, even getting at an occasional truth in a humble manner that's-as Junior Ray might put it-"as soft as a quail's fart."" --Publishers Weekly starred review

"Delivers rowdy humor, vivid description ... Although the narrator seems to revel in the thought of being degenerate, he and his novel display worthy qualities. ... Fun, entertainingly absurd, and sobering -- and readers will probably be inclined to re-visit several of its passages." --Arkansas Review

"Two wonderful books called Junior Ray and Yazoo Blues, written by John Pritchard, [use] a character, a retired police officer from the Delta here, narrated in a Delta dialect, to hilariously recount the culture and parts of history of this area. Its candor, dialect, and outrageous sensibility had me laughing aloud at times, and both are extremely delightful." --Cannabis Culture Magazine

Working as a security guard in a floating casino in the Mississppi Delta, Junior Ray Loveblood becomes obsessed with the Yazoo Pass expedition by the Union armada in 1863.