Murray, Albert 1916–

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Albert Murray 1916-

American critic, essayist, novelist, and poet.

INTRODUCTION

Murray is considered one of the foremost cultural critics of the mid- to late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Focusing largely on the influence of African American musical forms on the American culture and psyche—of both blacks and whites—Murray identified what he termed a "blues idiom," suggesting that it is this quality that lends the United States its unique character.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Murray was born in Nokomis, Alabama, in 1916. His mother was young and unmarried, so Murray was raised by a couple in Mobile. In grade school his teachers recognized his intelligence and academic capacity, and he was sent to the Mobile County Training School, where he was deeply influenced by his teachers. Murray earned his bachelor's degree from the prestigious Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in 1939. He briefly pursued graduate studies at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University before returning to teach at Tuskegee. Murray joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1943 and served until 1946 when he transferred to the U.S. Air Force reserves. In 1948, he earned his master's degree from New York University, then returned once again to teach at Tuskegee. Following some postgraduate study at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950, Murray was recalled to active duty in 1951. He rose to the rank of major before retiring from the military in 1962. At that time he moved with his family to Harlem to begin his writing career. His first book, a collection of essays entitled The Omni-Americans, was published in 1970. Murray's other writings of the 1970s included Train Whistle Guitar (1974), the first novel of what would eventually become a four-part fictional autobiography. Although he considered himself first and foremost a fiction writer, Murray's abiding interest in music shaped his work and led to his reputation as a premier cultural observer. In the 1980s his focus on jazz and blues as uniquely American art forms propelled him to venture beyond fiction writing into the world of music. He collaborated with the legendary jazz bandleader Count Basie on an autobiography, Good Morning Blues, published in 1985. Murray also established, with jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, the concert series Jazz at Lincoln Center, and serves on its board of directors; this major musical institution presents jazz as an art form comparable to classical symphonic music and opera. In the 1990s Murray resumed writing, finishing two more novels in his four-part series—The Spyglass Tree (1991), The Seven League Boots (1996)—and publishing a volume of poetry, a book of essays, and a collection of letters he had exchanged with his former Tuskegee schoolmate Ralph Ellison. Murray continued to write and received numerous honorary doctoral degrees and symposia on his life and work. In 1996 he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics' Circle. Murray completed his four-part series with the publication of The Magic Keys in 2005.

MAJOR WORKS

In Murray's seminal work, the essay collection The Omni-Americans, he put forth an idea that would shape much of his further thinking, as well as his reputation among black intellectuals: the American racial categories "black" and "white" are artificially constructed notions that ultimately damage both groups. Equally opposed to both the black nationalists of the time who advocated separatism and the white social and economic theorists who purported that black Americans were victims of white exploitation and of their own pathological tendencies, Murray argued that full racial integration was the only way to heal the damage done by institutional racism. He wrote in The Omni-Americans, "The so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other." In his next book, the travel narrative South to a Very Old Place (1972), Murray examined black culture in the South through the lens of a trip he took to southern cities that had made a strong impression on him, including Mobile, Tuskegee, and Memphis. Murray's first novel, Train Whistle Guitar—along with its sequels, The Spyglass Tree, The Seven League Boots, and The Magic Keys—follows the story of an intelligent young black boy named Scooter as he grows up in Mobile, Alabama, in the 1920s. In the second and third volumes, Scooter moves to Tuskegee and joins a swing-era jazz band. The fourth installment, The Magic Keys, finds Scooter newly married and a graduate student at New York University. While living in Manhattan, he is profoundly influenced by the people around him, particularly writers and musicians. Scooter's story concludes, in classic bildungsroman fashion, with his return to Alabama and a life of great promise.

In two books of music theory, The Hero and the Blues (1973) and Stomping the Blues (1976), Murray outlines a blues and jazz aesthetic that centers on the figure of a hero who, according to Murray, is not simply a musician but the embodiment of black American experience and values. He also maintains that improvisation—the essential element of jazz music—is a major factor in a communal tradition that was critical to the spirit of confrontation that spawned the movement to improve living conditions for blacks in the United States. Murray expanded his blues hypothesis in the volume The Blue Devils of Nada (1996), in which he argues that blues is the quintessential musical idiom that has animated the spirit of American life itself, offering inspiration not only to black Americans beset by racism, but to anyone troubled by the existential conundrums of modern life. In 2001 Murray published a volume of poetry, Conjugations and Reiterations, in which he uses elements of jazz, blues, and gospel music, as well as folk mythology, in lyrical poems that explore aspects of the American experience ranging from improvisational art to the wisdom of the gospels. From the Briarpatch File (2001) is a collection of essays, reviews, and interviews in which Murray reveals details of his personal journey as a writer, his admiration for the achievements of such legendary artists as Duke Ellington and William Faulkner, and further elucidates his thoughts on the role of the blues in American life.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Murray is universally admired in literary circles for the erudition, provocativeness, and lyricism of his writings. Considered one of the foremost American men of letters of the twentieth century, he has influenced several generations of black thinkers, encouraging African Americans to embrace the vibrancy of their culture rather than what Murray called in The Omni-Americans the "social science fiction" of damage and victimization that sociologists often attribute to black American life. Critics have noted Murray's refusal to adhere to any one ideology in explaining the African American experience as a major factor in the success of his works with both academic and popular readers. Additionally, he is considered a significant influence in the jazz and blues music industries both because of his philosophical writings on those subjects and because of his practical involvement in bringing performances to the public with the acclaimed Jazz at Lincoln Center series.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Omni-Americans (essays) 1970

South to a Very Old Place (travelogue) 1972

The Hero and the Blues (criticism) 1973

Train Whistle Guitar (novel) 1974

Stomping the Blues (criticism) 1976

Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie, as Told to Albert Murray (biography) 1985

Reflections on Logic, Politics, and Reality: A Challenge to the Sacred Consensus of Contemporary American Thinking (nonfiction) 1989

The Spyglass Tree (novel) 1991

The Blue Devils of Nada (nonfiction) 1996

The Seven League Boots (novel) 1996

Trading Twelves: Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray [editor, with John F. Callahan] (letters) 2000

Conjugations and Reiterations: Poems (poetry) 2001

From the Briarpatch File (essays) 2001

The Magic Keys (novel) 2005

CRITICISM

Sanford Pinsker (essay date autumn 1996)

SOURCE: Pinsker, Sanford. "Albert Murray: The Black Intellectuals' Maverick Patriarch." Virginia Quarterly Review 72, no. 4 (autumn 1996): 678-84.

[In the following essay, Pinsker discusses Murray's role as a black American intellectual, emphasizing his independence of mind.]

If the public intellectual is best defined as a specialist in being a non-specialist, maverick intellectuals add a certain amount of unpredictability to the formula, for they tend to regard group-think of any sort with suspicion. And nowhere is the inclination stronger than when public intellectuals operate in ways that remind maverick types of Harold Rosenberg's famous description of the New York intellectuals as a "herd of independent minds." Saul Bellow, for example, makes it his habit to distrust nearly anything that too many "deep thinkers" agree about—partly because he thinks of himself as a writer rather than as a socio-political type, and partly because genuinely independent types are not likely to feel comfortable hammering out a consensus.

Albert Murray, the black critic-writer, is a kindred spirit, not only because, at 77, he brings nearly as much accumulated experience to cultural matters as does the octogenarian Bellow but also because he has made it his business to swim against the tides of fashion. The difference, of course, is that Bellow, for all the battles fought and lumps taken, never suffered from the cruelest sting of all: anonymity. From The Dangling Man (1944) onward, his novels were widely reviewed and often lavishly praised. New, ever more prestigious awards seemed to follow effortlessly on the heels of earlier ones; and for at least two generations of reader-critics, Bellow's cultural pronouncements have had the heft of holy writ. By contrast, the arc of Murray's career has a very different trajectory. His first collection, The Omni-Americans (1970), argued that the language of social science inadequately—and insufficiently—captures the richness of the black American experience. Indeed, by concentrating on versions of black pathology and the fits of shame, self-hatred, and rage that these engender, opinion-makers such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Kenneth Clark sell black culture short. For the truth is that this vibrant, multi-faceted culture is no less complex than that of any other group (to write it off as disorganized and emasculated by centuries of white oppression is dangerously reductive), but also that it has produced, in Murray's words, "the most complicated culture and therefore the most complicated sensibility in the modern world."

The Omni-Americans threw off such maverick insights easily, and by the fistful. The rub, of course, is that they were very much against the grain of that time, that place. Murray, for example, still clung to the word "Negro" at a cultural moment when Black was the operative word—not only as a adjective defining a new sense of "power," but also of aesthetics. Worse, in an age of the afro, he could even manage to call up a few kind words on behalf of hair straighteners. What he meant to celebrate was a vision of America as "incontestably mulatto" and to argue for a halt to the facile ways in which white norms were contrasted with black deviations: "… the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other."

Granted, black communities have their own styles, and these are best represented in the jazz and blues traditions. Where others rode through black ghettos and saw only the despair of poverty and the thumbprints of pathology, Murray argues for the effortless aristocracy of a Duke Ellington or Count Basie, and for the sheer resilience of black life per se: "its elastic individuality … its esthetic receptivity, and its unique blend of warmth, sensitivity, nonsense, vitality and elegance." None of these things, he rightly points out, suggests emasculation, much less adds up to the smoldering rage that found its most articulate spokesman in James Baldwin.

In fact, Murray was as complicated a social critic as American blacks were as a people. He could luxuriate in the best examples of black culture without for a moment embracing the angry case being made for separatism, just as he could look evidences of racism squarely in the eye without losing faith in the promises made to all Americans in the documents of our Founding Fathers:

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the social, economic, and political heritage of all Americans…. So far as white people are concerned, the most revolutionary, radical and devastating action any U.S. Negro can engage in is to compete with other Americans for status, employment, total social equality, and basic political power.

Not surprisingly, many reviewers, black as well as white, were in no mood to take Murray's vision seriously. Did he really believe, Saunders Redding asked, that the WASP ethic works as well for blacks as it is generally believed to work for whites? What seemed like a rhetorical question 26 years ago now has more than a measure of legitimacy because blacks in significant numbers have, in fact, joined the middle class. One could argue, of course, that this is the result of the Civil Rights Movement and that would be true in part; but the greater part, I would submit, has to do with the positive, upbeat qualities of black life that Murray isolated in The Omni-Americans.

I am not much attracted to the word "denial," largely because it is psychobabble and usually because when it is trotted out stiff counter-arguments are called for; but denial is probably the best (probably the only) way to account for Murray's virtual anonymity as a mainstream black intellectual. That the black community knew him and in varying degrees, took him seriously is true enough, but it is even truer that the abiding influence of Murray's vision had to wait until 1980, when Stanley Crouch, his feisty, free-wheeling protégé, wrote a piece entitled "Chittlins at the Waldorf: The Work of Albert Murray." As Crouch's star shot into the stratosphere (Notes of a Hanging Judge [1990], a collection of cultural essays that includes the piece on Murray and that won the National Book Award, was followed by a sec- ond collection (The All-American Skin Game [1995]) and what can only be called media celebrity), Murray suddenly became a figure to reckon with. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profiled him in the pages of The New Yorker ("King of Cats" [April 8, 1996]), and in short order the intellectual community was divided between those busily "rediscovering" his work and those, like myself, who found themselves scrambling to read whole swathes of Murray for the first time.

No doubt Murray must find much of this ironic, for if he labored many years under Ralph Ellison's very long shadow (they were classmates at Tuskegee, close friends as the arc of their respective careers took very different turns, and finally, prideful antagonists when the line between master and disciple, influencer and influenced, gradually blurred), he now finds himself mentioned in the same breath with Stanley Crouch, a man both more famous and many years his junior.

When the voluminous Ellison-Murray correspondence is eventually published, we will move beyond gossip to something closer to the truth about their complicated relationship; and no doubt their respective biographies, surely warranted, will shed their shares of light. Meanwhile, what we have is the portrait of a man of letters, for Murray is equally comfortable as a novelist, music critic, and cultural analyst. Indeed, the apparently disparate interests converge into a single vision of black life as richer, more complicated, and finally of such singular importance to the very rhythms of the republic. Each is an extension, rather than a diminishment, of the possibilities of the other, with the result that Murray's work often seems to pluck at a single string.

But what a string, and what notes it nonetheless manages to make! For Murray simply never bought into the narrow view of racism-and-rage that has been the dominant mode of most black literature since Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). If there are a few good voices rattling around in his head, they belong to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce—and of course a whole retinue of jazz men like Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Thelonius Monk. Taken together, what they articulate is jazz, an idiom at once authentically black and deeply American. What Murray knew to his very bones some 30 years ago—and that he has been embroidering ever since—is that black writers and critics "have mostly been preoccupied with the literal document as agitprop journalism, so much so that for all the realistic details to make the reader feel that all this really happens, their stories seldom rise above the level of one-dimensional patently partisan social case histories." Murray made these remarks during a 1977 interview, but the words ring as true now as they did then.

Indeed, the very fact that he chooses to preface his latest collection, The Blue Devils of Nada, with talk about the limitations of realism and the more expansive possibilities of the lyrical mode suggest something about what it means for a black maverick intellectual to stay the course. Then, as now, the race for attention has often gone to the loudest voice insisting on this-or-that stance as a litmus test for authentic blackness. Generally, the stances of choice have been political (a clenched fist, an Afro, a dashiki), but at bottom what they come to are futile exercises in romanticism—at best, distractions from the main business of consensus-building; at worst, dangerous efforts to destabilize the republic. The black aesthetic movement was, of course, Black Power's cultural wing, and while its early practitioners fairly dripped with sound-and-fury, they have produced no Faulkners. Indeed, what must have galled those who turned their collective backs on the white devil's bookshelf is that Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) remains one of our century's most accomplished novels, made possible precisely because its author cobbled what he learned from Eliot and Joyce, Conrad and Mann, to what he knew from the streets and the jazz rhythms doing riffs inside his soul.

And it is here that the paths of Murray and Ellison meet, for Murray's essays are at once a defense of an Ellison increasingly under attack (by refusing to hew the party line, Ellison's novel earned an unparalleled enmity among black critics who refused to recognize the greatness under their very eyes) and a justification of his own fiction, jazz criticism, and cultural commentary. But where Ellison's essays cultivated an elegance of expression, or put another way, the cool disinterestedness of an intellectual in his booklined study, Murray's prose often had the earmarks of a scrapper. He said it as it was, long before Howard Cosell turned the phrase into a grammatically inept trademark, and long before Stanley Crouch learned to trade vivid one-liners on "The Charlie Rose Show." Here, for example, is how Murray responded to an interviewer asking him if he thought "many critics today are receptive to, or aware of, the changes going on in black fiction":

Critics? Man, most critics feel that unless brownskin U.S. writers are pissing and moaning about injustice they have nothing to say. In any case, it seems that they find it much easier to praise such writers for being angry (which requires no talent, not to mention genius) than for being innovative or insightful.

One of the critics Murray surely had in mind was Irving Howe, a man who believed that the conditions of black life could not help but produce social realism of a certain stripe. Ellison's strongly worded demurral (contained in his essay, "The World and the Jug") is well known, dozens of Murray's essays, essentially elaborating on the same point, are less so; but what they share is a belief that narrowed expectations lead inevitably to diminished results, and that the path to genuine liberation is likely to be as complicated as it is fiercely individual. Murray, who was much attracted to sagas of herohood (see The Hero and the Blues, 1973), felt that most biographies of black folk left out everything that makes black life rich, and a transcendent black art possible: "style in general and stylish clothes in particular, all of the manifest love of good cooking and festive music and dancing and communal good times (both secular and sacred), all of the notorious linguistic exuberance, humor, and outrageous nonsense, not to mention all of the preoccupation with love and lovemaking (that blues lyrics are so full of)"—these, captured in the very riffs and glides of Murray's own style, are the stuff that, taken together, make up the black lifestyle and that its best artists capture in their music, and sometimes in their prose.

By contrast, most writing about blacks seems a pale carbon copy of the genuine article, one driven by special agendas that wring the life out of the very thing it attempts to capture. Hence,

… most biographies and autobiographies of so-called U.S. black folks tend to read like case histories or monographs written to illustrate some very special (and often very narrow) political theory, or ideology of blackness, or to promote some special political program. Such writing serves a very useful purpose, to be sure. But the approach does tend to oversimplify character, situation, and motive in the interest of social and political issues as such, and in the process human beings at best become sociopolitical abstractions. At worst they are reduced to clichés.

We have learned to settle for one-dimensional portraits of black life—and, to our collective shame, even learned how to praise them. In this sense, a maverick type like Murray is an important player in the ongoing dialogue about what is worthy of serious regard and what is decidedly slimmer goods. It is, after all, still possible for certain black intellectuals to make a splash with books that talk about hip-hop in the language of semiotics and deconstruction. What Murray provides is an alternative, one confident that Ellington and Basie's music will last—and matter—long after Snoop Doggy Dogg has long been forgotten, and that the thickly textured passages of memoir contained in Murray's South to a Very Old Place (1971) will continue to captivate so long as there are people who care about the suppleness of well-wrought paragraphs.

America has been blessed with maverick intellectuals at least since the days of Emerson and Thoreau. They tend to be larger in impact than they are in raw numbers. For a very long time, the number of black intellectuals could be counted on the fingers of a single hand, with W.E. B Dubois so dwarfing the competition that many were not even aware that there was competition. But even as we note with pride that a critical mass of black public intellectuals now exists, the number of maverick black intellectuals, those with a genuine independence of mind and equal measures of spunk remains quite small. To them, Albert Murray stands as a patriarch, with all the adoration and resistance that the term properly inspires. More important, though, for Americans of all colors, his work speaks to the best we are and the even richer possibilities of what we might become.

Paul Devlin (essay date spring 2007)

SOURCE: Devlin, Paul. "Albert Murray at Ninety." Antioch Review 65, no. 2 (spring 2007): 256-65.

[In the following essay, Devlin provides a retrospective of Murray's life and works.]

There is only the ultimate actuality of entropy … of the void, upon which we impose such metaphorical devices as AND, as in (andoneandtwoandthreeandfourand) and one, and two, and three, and four and so forth and so on from which we also get "and it came to pass and so on it went time after time after time." as has been recorded here, there, and elsewhere.
—Albert Murray, The Magic Keys, 2005

Albert Murray turned ninety in May 2006 (the month that also marked his sixty-fifth year of marriage to his wife, Mozelle). He has had one of the most impressive and influential literary careers of the last fifty years, yet he has failed to find fame with the public at large, though almost all of his thirteen books are still in print, with major trade presses. It has been said that his work is difficult. Perhaps this is because he is among the most original literary stylists in English during the past fifty years, a claim supported by even casual perusal of his quartet novels or travelogue-memoir South to a Very Old Place, which are narrated in a highly unusual, distinctively Southern voice that orchestrates idiomatic down-home African-American speech through the high modernist masters who formed the core of Murray's literary influences. It's not for nothing that he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.

An "African-American" from Mobile, Alabama, Murray prefers the word Negro, which was the respectful term when he was growing up. Murray has emphasized the "incontestably mulatto" nature of American culture, following Constance Rourke's claim that the American character is part Yankee, Negro, Backwoodsman, and Indian. How can the man who wrote The Omni-Americans be African-American?

At the Mobile County Training School, Murray was a good baseball player and star student, winning scholarships to Tuskegee Institute (B.S., 1939). He went on to study at Northwestern, the University of Michigan, New York University (M.A., 1948), the Sorbonne, and Air University. Though he taught English and directed the theater at Tuskegee, he also had another career as Major Murray, United States Air Force, from which he retired in 1962. He did not publish his first book, The Omni-Americans, a collection of essays and articles he wrote in the mid to late 1960s, until 1970, at age fifty-four; for this reason, his turning ninety may seem to have come out of the blue and it is all the more cause for celebration. He was not, like his contemporaries Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, or Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on the scene from the late 1940s onward. It should also be noted that Murray's story is proof positive that it is possible, with the luck of good health, to start over, lead two lives, have two successful careers, and that a retirement need not be dull.

The Omni-Americans was first subtitled "Black Experience and American Culture." The subtitle of a later edition of this attack on social scientific approaches to race and culture in America much better explains Murray's views: "Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy and the Fakelore of Black Pathology." The Omni-Americans received wide and immediate attention when it was published (making the cover of The Washington Post Book World). In a review the novelist Walker Percy called it "a book about race and the United States that fits no ideology, resists all abstractions, offends orthodox liberals and conservatives, attacks social scientists and Governor Wallace in the same breath, sees all the faults of the country, and holds out hope in the end." In The Omni-Americans, Murray rejects African cultural patrimony for African-Americans; riffing on Thomas Mann's pragmatic approach to the measurement of time in the prelude, "Joseph and His Brothers," Murray dates African-American dimension of American culture primarily to the middle passage. He writes that "there is truly no urgent reason to trace the origin of U.S. Negro style and manner any farther back in time than … 1619—if indeed that far." As a character in Murray's novel The Seven League Boots remarks, "Africa? Hey that's alright with me about the great-grandaddy of my drums and the grandmammy of the mellow brown in my complexion…. This music ain't got nothing to do with sending no messages to some chief across the river somewhere over yonder. This music we play is about going somewhere and getting on sometime in the United States of America."

What followed was an impressive and ambitious parade of books, which includes, aside from his novels and memoir, a group of what he called "literary notes," worth about a warehouse full of dissertations, which rethink farce, the blues, and the hero-image (The Hero and the Blues, 1973), a poetics and anthropology of jazz (Stomping the Blues, 1976), an as-told-to biography of Count Basie (Good Morning Blues, 1986), two essay collections (The Blue Devils of Nada, 1996 and From the Briarpatch File, 2001), a uniquely Murrayan book of poetry (Conjugations and Reiterations, 2001), not to mention a lively and learned letter exchange with Ralph Ellison (Trading Twelves, 2000).

"Endless negation," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is a flat affair." "Who," he asked in a lecture condemning slavery, "can long continue to feel an interest in condemning homicide, or counterfeiting, or wife beating?" For anyone who feels they will sleep longer than Rip Van Winkle next time they hear the word critique, Murray offers a sort of cosmic stoicism delivered with barbershop humor while wearing a tuxedo, standing in front of a big band. For Murray, who grew up in Mobile knowing ex-slaves and even some who had been personally brought over from Africa on the last slave ship to arrive in the U.S. (the Clotilde), affirmation certainly does not include acceptance of injustice but rather an orientation toward dealing with it. In The Hero and the Blues, Murray advocates regarding obstacles in terms of "adventure and romance" rather than in terms of social science or what we would today call critical theory (the Marx-Freud derived). It makes a better story. A better work of art. The other stuff cannot swing. To affirm life is to aim for elegance in spite of entropy. As he wrote in The Blue Devils of Nada, "the affirmative disposition toward the harsh actualities of human existence … is characteristic of the fully orchestrated blues statement." For Murray the world is a briarpatch and the hero like the rabbit, whether Brer Rabbit or Duke Ellington's "Cottontail," who must maintain a dapper fur coat. The man who wrote Stomping the Blues, winner of the ASCAP award for music criticism in 1977, meant "stomping" euphemistically: to "stomp" the blues is to elegantly dance them away, not to smash them into the ground. (Murray illustrated this on CSPAN in 2002. The blues thrive on the clenched fist but cannot withstand a snap on the afterbeat.) In the words of Duke Ellington, who called Murray "the unsquarest person I know," "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing"—a phrase that has long been Murray's mantra. In Murray's words, expressed in a 1996 interview with The New York Observer, "the question … is whether life is worth living. Are you going to wake up one morning and cut your throat or go stomping at the Savoy? You know what I'm goin' do!"

Murray was born in Nokomis, Alabama, in 1916 and raised by adoptive parents in Magazine Point on the outskirts of Mobile; even the small town of his inauspicious, illegitimate birth recalls greatness in American literature. Remember Longfellow: "by the shining big sea water / stood the wigwam of Nokomis." In the cosmopolitan seaport of Mobile and segregation of central Alabama at Tuskegee Institute, Murray's mind formed in those years of the Depression a unique outlook on American history and culture, which may serve as a guide for all the world, regardless of time and place. Murray's life has taken him throughout the deep South, to Paris, Morocco, Los Angeles, and finally to the "beanstalk castle town" of New York, where he has left his mark on some of the city's most august cultural institutions.

As a novelist, Murray's achievement is less recognized than it should be, but not less than any novelist of the last fifty years. In a quartet of semi-autobiographical novels, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991), The Seven League Boots (1996), and The Magic Keys (2005), Murray chronicles the adventures of Scooter, a promising young man from Gasoline Point, Alabama. The cheerful narrator, who is always playing with time and memory, could have dedicated these books to Stendhal's "happy few." Representation of victimization or the effects of racism and oppression on the young hero are nowhere to be found, though they do appear as aspects of the larger world, most especially in The Spyglass Tree. Scooter succeeds not by making a lot of money or advancing a political program or telling the white man that he feels something is amiss, but by becoming comfortable with his own consciousness. They are like novels that are "after the novel" as a historicized genre, yet "before" it as well, with roots in the epic and fairy tale (note the special objects as titles) and possibly in some prose works of the classical world, the gospels in particular. There are more than a few analogies between the four novels and the four gospels, which may explain why they do not read at all like typical novels. (Like Guillermo Cabrera-Infante, Murray is particularly interested in plot.) For instance, tones and emphases change slightly from book to book. Characters come and go and repeat with slight difference, as if four different narrators each purported to narrate a different section of Scooter's story. Ultimately, these novels (in which no character's speech is in quotation marks) form something like a novelized fairy tale, a picaresque adventure that owes little in style or structure to the great nineteenth-century novels or even much to the important modernist works that influenced Murray so strongly (though the influence of Joyce, Mann, Proust, and Malraux are there just under the surface, alongside the countless Uncle, or "Unka," Remuses of Murray's boyhood). These novels are highly original not just for their lilting lyrical choreography, but in the sense that they are structured along the lines of jazz compositions. As Murray has remarked in interviews, he learned from Thomas Mann's literary use of some of the elements of European art music, such as leitmotifs, that he could use elements of American art music (jazz), such as vamps, breaks, riffs, and tags, to structure a novel.

In Train Whistle Guitar, Scooter has a wide array of adventures around the outskirts of Mobile, learning valuable lessons from a host of charismatic characters, including an outspoken World War I veteran, a star piano player whom Scooter watches defy the orders of a white sheriff, and his greatest hero, a freight-train-hopping guitar player who catches him attempting to run away and stops him, encouraging him to go to school. Scooter's take on sports, American history, personalities around town, and various childhood topics rings completely true. In The Spyglass Tree, Scooter goes off to school at a college similar to Tuskegee. The title is a metaphor for college and thus for education itself: a high vantage point from which to regard one's own experience. Scooter is not really shown learning in the classroom, but rather around it—from his mysterious polymath roommate; from a local blues singer, Hortense Hightower; in the library; and from successful African American businessmen in town—as the book flashes back and forth from his earlier days to his current situation. Scooter's willingness to perform an act of selfless heroism in a racial conflict leads to Hortense Hightower's arranging for him to obtain a bass fiddle. By the next book, The Seven League Boots, which the Los Angeles Times called a "rich and moving song of the human spirit," Scooter is playing in the band of the Bossman, a Duke Ellingtonesque band leader. He spends time in New York and Los Angeles with the band, dates a movie star, visits Europe, and does all sorts of hip things in a sleek version of the late 1930s. The style of The Seven League Boots evokes its posh settings as perfectly as Train Whistle Guitar 's style evokes the gritty and folksy outskirts of Mobile circa 1920. In The Magic Keys, Scooter has (temporarily?) abandoned music, having settled down with his college sweetheart, and is going to graduate school and getting reacquainted with an old college pal, Taft Edison (Ralph Ellison). Most importantly, as the quarter draws to a close, Scooter is gearing up to write the biography ("The Dancing of an Attitude: The Foot Notes of the One and Only Royal Highness") of one of his many mentors, a tap dancer known as Royal Highness, formerly known as Kid Stomp the Royal High Stepper and Kid Royal King of the Stompers. ("Who says I ain't?")

His 1971 travelogue-memoir, South to a Very Old Place, was included in the Modern Library in 1995. The book starts in midtown Manhattan, where Murray notes that first one must go North to go South, and proceeds to give an unforgettable portrait of Harlem (his home since 1962). Next he heads a bit further north, to New Haven, then begins the journey "down the way" to North Carolina, Atlanta, Tuskegee, Mobile, New Orleans, and Memphis, visiting, talking, signifying, and speculating on how the South has changed or not changed in the wake of the civil rights movement. As Murray remarks to a journalist over dinner in Atlanta, "I'm not down here to run any statistics but just to see how it feels. I'm operating on my literary radar … my metaphor finder—how about that?" He talks to blacks and whites of large reputation and no reputation. Reports of his talks with Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, and Walker Percy exist alongside analysis such as this, from an old man in Mobile, during an "after-supper back porch rocking-chair session in the fig-tree-fresh, damp-clay-scented twilight":

its going to take one of these old Confederate bushwhackers from right down through in here to go up against these old southern white folks when they get mad. My daddy used to say it over and over again. So when Lyndon Johnson got in there on a humble—and boy that's the onliest way he coulda made it in there—I was watching with my fingers crossed…. [H]e was one of them and if they made him mad he was subject to do some of that rowdy cracker cussing right back at them, and some of that old cowboy stuff to boot. When they commence to telling me about how mean he is, I say that's exactly what we need, some mean old crackers on our side for a change…. That's why I got to give old Lyndon Johnson credit. Because all he had to do was let them know he was going to hold the line on the black man and he could've stayed up there as long as he wanted to…. That's why I got to give him credit don't care who don't. Because I know what he coulda done and I remember what he did for a fact. He got up there in front of everybody and said we shall overcome. Boy that's enough to scare white folks worse than the Indians, boy.

Another substantial work of nonfiction is The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement. This collection of essays, written mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, contains indispensable insights on Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Romare Bearden, and Count Basie, but the shining masterpiece in the book is the eighty-page essay (which reads more like a rollicking, impassioned sermon), "The Storyteller as Blues Singer: Ernest Hemingway Swinging the Blues and Taking Nothing." Here Murray argues persuasively for Hemingway's inclusion in the blues tradition and makes the case that the philosophy of the blues, as he sees it, was intuited and written by Hemingway, especially in the short stories.

Not slowing down for a moment, in 2001 Murray published a highly original book of poetry, Conjugations and Reiterations, and another book of essays, From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity. In his poetry, inspired by W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens no more or less than the blues, Murray presents an unexpected patchwork quilt of styles and topics, from twelve-bar blues stanzas about hopping freight trains to a long, Faulknerian rumination on Faulkner, to a celebration of Louis Armstrong and an Armstrongesque mock sermon. From the Briarpatch File is a miscellaney that not only includes some of Murray's most abstract thoughts on the nature of art, but also important essays on Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and two of his most in-depth and unguarded interviews.

Without Albert Murray, the story of American culture (and the African-American influence on it in particular) of the last fifty years might be, for the worse, very different. Murray's impact on culture comes not just from his contributions to world belle-lettres but, not unlike Pound (on Pound's better days), from his generosity and behind-the-scenes curating and coaching. Who knows where some of his close friends, such as Romare Bearden, Ralph Ellison, or Wynton Marsalis, would have been without Murray's voice of humor and learning, shared downhome-modernist aesthetic, and shared experience to steady them in their endeavors? Murray's as-told-to autobiography of Count Basie is one of the most highly regarded jazz memoirs, not just for its historical value but for Murray's authentic capture of Basie's voice and manner. The Murray-Bearden collaboration, in which Murray served as all-around literary adviser (naming paintings, suggesting themes and series, ghost-writing prose pieces, writing catalog essays), helped Bearden (who was already successful when Murray moved to New York and renewed the friendship made in Paris in 1950) shoot into the stratosphere in the 1960s and beyond. Who knows what musical direction his friend Wynton Marsalis might have taken, or if Marsalis's Jazz Lincoln Center would stand as it does today as the defender and conservatory of classic jazz? In the 1970s, Murray worked closely with Martin Williams to develop the Smithsonian Jazz programs. This heroic act of cultural preservation and reclamation eventually grew into what became in 1996 a full constituent of Lincoln Center, Jazz Lincoln Center, where Murray has been closely involved since its inception as a concert series in 1987 and continues on the board today. It should be noted, considering the traditional "blackness" of Jazz Lincoln Center, that Murray has been accused of promoting an ethnic essentialism as regards the performance of jazz music. But that notion has grown out of a lazy interpretation of Murray's claim that the formal structure of the music contains specifically American inflections and variations and it helps to have been, as many African-American musicians are (and always have been), raised in church to have a more complete grasp of the whole vocabulary, not to mention a tendency to put the proper feeling into the music. By no means, for Murray, can white musicians not measure up; but, especially years ago, there was sometimes a bit of a disconnect between the assessments of the formal appreciators (many white) and white musicians.

Because of their shared concerns and similar outlooks on American culture, and also because Murray, though only two years younger, emerged on the scene two decades later, he is often looked at as synonymous with and/or a protégé of his friend Ralph Ellison. Though together (and also with Harold Cruse) their work comprises a formidable attack on Pan-Africanism (any by extension pan-anythingism: Slavism, Germanism, or whatever), Ellison and Murray are quite different. Reading their 1950-1960 letter exchange, Trading Twelves, dispels notions of Ellison's having influenced Murray and reveals two mature thinkers and artists riffing and joking on all sorts of subjects. Also, for instance, in their writings on jazz, Murray is much more focused on the ritual and anthropological dimensions than Ellison. Murray had a somewhat different reading list than Ellison and was a much more serious and substantive reader of Thomas Mann, not to mention Hermann Broch. In their novels, Murray is a sunny Tolstoy to Ellison's dark Doestoevsky. Murray's "shimmering summer sunshine blueness" which meant "whistling time and rambling time. And also baseball time," a joyous feeling that permeates his novels (even when the action takes place at night), contrasts sharply with the dark humor and nightmarish surrealism of Ellison's Invisible Man and parts of Juneteenth. The critic Van Wyck Brooks once had a theory about Mark Twain: that he laughed so hard he cried. Twain's laughter is closer to Ellison's, who laughed at the American scene to keep from exploding. Swift, Voltaire, Twain, and Ellison all laughed the laugh of the satirical reformer. Murray's laughter is closer to the uproarious Rabelais, who also had a thing or two to say about farce.

Today the ideas Murray espoused (along with Ralph Ellison, to be fair) about the "mulatto" nature of American culture have become commonplace. Prominent African American baby boom writers and/or professors such as Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, the late August Wilson, Charles Johnson, James Alan McPherson, Robert O'Meally, and Stanley Crouch, who were all around in the maelstrom of the 1960s, listened to the steady voices of writers from their parents' generation and they all basically ended up subscribing (more or less) to the Murray-Ellison vision of American culture. This is the vision that won out (partially, perhaps, through Murray's personal accessibility and friendly guidance) and why you see some of these gentlemen on PBS and widely dispersed throughout contemporary culture, instead of, say, Ron Karenga, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Amiri Baraka, Leonard Jeffries, or their disciples. Though the Murray-Ellison line of inclusion, hybrid mixed-up tangled identity, may have looked conservative or wacky in 1970, today it looks like the appropriate vision for our globalized world—a vision, particularly in Murray's case, that nicely balances local particulars with cosmopolitan tastes. Indeed, what someone recently said of Henri Bergson may apply to Murray as regards his "incontestably mulatto" America: late in life Bergson no longer seemed especially original because stunning ideas he espoused forty years earlier "thoroughly saturated the times conceptions." Meanwhile, perspectives on race and identity aside, Stomping the Blues, with its emphasis on the centrality of swing and the blues in jazz, in addition to some of his other writings on music, has largely shaped the broad vision of Jazz Lincoln Center, to say nothing of other institutions. Murray's novels will find their audience, even if they must wait as long as John Donne's poetry, though I suspect it will not take quite that long. His nonfiction critical prose, The Hero and the Blues, and his essays, monuments of fearlessly original literary thinking about the most fundamental topics—such as How should one regard obstacles? What does America mean? What is the relationship of art to life?—will enthrall anyone who would try to go beyond contemporary cynicism on such topics. Art, for Murray, following Suzanne K. Langer, is the life of human feeling. In contemporary academic discourse, feeling is often derided as having led to the twentieth century's worst atrocities, but Murray comes from a group on whom atrocities were inflicted, who had to preserve feeling, and most importantly, complex humor, alongside which high-handed political ideologies can hardly compete, which is also perhaps why Murray and Ellison won out over the pseudo-piety and dull rage of the figures mentioned above.

Murray's fierce common sense, his rigorous pragmatism, his recognition of the farcical shadow play behind all action and the iron law of entropy, yet Malrauvian commitment to art in spite of it, is a worldview for any century. The answers Murray gives are from a man who first published at fifty-four and now is ninety, a man who grew up without electricity in Mobile, Alabama, knew former slaves and freight-train-hopping blues players, went to college on scholarships, read the Western canon and more backwards and forwards, became an expert on the music he lived in terms of, served his country for twenty years, and traversed the globe, slowly formulating ideas and working out a style, until settling in Harlem to write it all down—and thank goodness he did, because his work, no less than an Armstrong solo or Bearden collage, is one of the best antidotes to the blues there is. This is useful because, as the epilogue to Stomping the Blues states, "Nor has anybody ever been able to get rid of the blues forever…. You can only drive them away and keep them at bay for the time being. Because they are always there, waiting and watching. So retirement is out of the question … all you have to do to keep them in their proper place, which is deep in the dozens, is to pat your feet and snap your fingers." And darned if his paragraphs aren't orchestrated for that effect!