Prologue Summary and Analysis

In the brief prologue, Bragg explains the All Over But the Shoutin' is something like a memoir of growing up in the South around the time of the Korean War. He will introduce the reader to all of his family, making one laugh and cry. The story is one of a strong woman, a tortured man and three sons who lived near cotton fields in northeastern Alabama, in the thick of racism. His father was a raging drunk and terrorized his family, but this was due in large part to the horrors he witnessed during the Korean War, a story he only told Bragg on his deathbed. His mother endured his father until he died. Bragg claims to tell the story because his mother and grandmother permitted him to write it down so that there would be a record of what...