Ernest J.Gaines died (5/11/2019)A

African-American writer. He sounds interesting.
Born 1933 on Riverlake Plantation, Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana, into a sharecropping family which went back four generations in the same place. They still lived in the old slaves' quarters.
Moved to California in his teens, where he got his higher education (San Francisco State, Stanford) and got serious about being a writer.
But he was back in Louisiana from 1981, and lived his last years in a house on part of the old Plantation.
His 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
"In 1996, Gaines spent a full semester as a visiting professor at the University of Rennes in France, where he taught the first creative writing class ever offered in the French university system."
This explains how he came to be a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Wiki).
He has a 1998 essay called "Mozart and Leadbelly", from which Crystal quotes. The title makes me want to read it, but I don't think I'll buy the book:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ernest-j-gaines/mozart-and-leadbelly/
Anyhow, not much about language per se.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_J._Gaines