Explore the 10 titles currently associated with Roger McGuinn in Literra’s catalogue. Each title opens its book page, with the available description and information about its collection.
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Ain' No Mo' Cane on de Brazis is rooted in the language, music, and oral storytelling traditions associated with Black life in the American South, using dialect and vernacular expression to preserve voices that formal literary language often excluded. The title itself signals loss and
Delia’s Gone is a traditional song or narrative ballad centered on loss, regret, and the consequences of violence. The title itself carries the emotional structure: Delia is absent, and that absence becomes the center around which the narrator’s guilt, grief, or obsession is organized
Go to Sea Once More is a traditional maritime ballad built around regret, hardship, and the repeated pull of life at sea. Sailor songs often balance the romance of adventure against the physical reality of labor, isolation, storms, discipline, and homesickness
Liverpool Gals presents working-class women and the social world of Liverpool through the language of popular entertainment. The title evokes songs, characters, and local identity rather than formal literary respectability
Michael, Row the Boat Ashore is a traditional African-American spiritual whose simple refrain carries far more history than its words initially suggest. The song imagines a journey across the waters toward the biblical Jordan and the promised land beyond it, turning a boat voyage into a
Ride Railroad Bill belongs to the family of American folk songs built around legendary or notorious characters who live outside polite society. Railroad Bill is imagined as a dangerous, elusive figure associated with trains, theft, outlaw behavior, and the freedom of someone who refuses to stay
Spanish Is the Loving Tongue is a folk song of longing, wandering, and the complicated relationship between language and memory. The singer associates the Spanish language with tenderness and home, creating a sense that a language can carry emotional history in a way ordinary geography cannot
The Squid-Jigging Ground is a maritime poem centered on the labor, atmosphere, and strange beauty of night fishing. Its subject sounds ordinary—fishermen heading out to catch squid—but the poem transforms the work into a rhythmic scene of darkness, water, light, exhaustion, and companionship
St. James Infirmary Blues is a traditional American blues song built around death, mourning, and the recognition that life can change in an instant
The Whale Catchers is a maritime adventure built around the dangerous world of whaling, where men, ships, weather, and enormous animals meet in an industry that demands technical skill and extraordinary physical courage. The story places its characters in an environment where the ocean can
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