Albert Murray (1916–2013)

Albert Murray grew up in Mobile, Alabama, went to Tuskegee, and lived and worked in New York. In South to a Very Old Place, which started as an assignment for Harper's, Murray recounts conversations, reminisces about his college years, travels throughout the regions he's known, and reflects on race relations of the time and what's changed - and hasn't - since he left.

From New York, he starts in New Haven, then south to Greensboro, Atlanta, Tuskegee, Mobile and finally gives us New Orleans, show more Greenville and Memphis all in one chapter. He draws the reader in referring to himself in second person, so "you" are the one traveling and having these conversations. He'll often riff on a thought in long, winding sentences that read like a written form of musical improvisation. In some chapters, his main focus is on conversations with white Southern writers, where he might discuss Faulkner or other literary works he and his conversational partner admire. In "Tuskegee", he mostly talks about his own experiences there in the 1930s. And in "Mobile," much of the conversation is older folks that remembered him as a boy talking to him about various topics, such as one old-timer about Lyndon Johnson. He unabashedly does not explain himself or his point of view for a white audience, and in some ways I'm sure I missed some things that he was saying, but in another it was good for me not to be the center of attention. I enjoyed it, was challenged by it, and ultimately would read another of Murray's works. show less

Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues gets right at that sweet spot where mind & body meet, thinking head and dancing feet—the blend of sensuousness and contemplation that makes blues and jazz sound and feel right. Murray had an advantage over many writers, in that his background was in the black American South, from whence hails the music of which he speaks. Otis Ferguson wrote in 1939 that ‘authority in folk art demands the bred-in-the-bone understanding which neither takes it too show more solemnly nor falls for frivolity and fad,’ and he could have been thinking of Murray.

In Stomping the Blues, Murray writes of the communal sources and meaning of blues music and jazz, and how folk forms evolve into forms of art—functional, performative, consciously contrived. His writing is deliberately composed and pleasurably erudite, without the cover of modish theory or academic jargon. You may not agree with him, but you are glad that the man has his say. Murray begins by asserting that blues music (as distinct from the blues as a feeling of gloom and despair) is essentially dance music, and that the rhythm and release inherent in the music is an essential aspect of human existence.

…of all the age-old ways of dispelling the ominous atmosphere that comes along with the blues, the one most people seem to have found to be most effective all told also turns out to be essentially compatible with a great majority of the positive impulses, urges, drives, cravings, needs, desires, and hence the definitive purposes, goals and ideals of their existence. Nor should its identification come as a surprise to sufficiently attentive students of culture and civilization, and certainly not to students of the nature and function of aesthetics. The blues counteragent that is so much a part of many people’s equipment for living that they hardly ever think about it as such anymore is that artful and sometimes seemingly magical combination of idiomatic incantation and percussion that creates the dance-oriented good-time music also known as the blues.

Blues music—at once American and universal—is the cure for the blues. Black musicians developed the blues idiom by blending the incantation and percussion inherited from Africa with European elements encountered in the American context. Dance-hall-oriented instrumentalists began ‘ragging’ and ‘jazzing’ the breaks between blues choruses, extending, elaborating and refining their improvisations, and the result was a new music which came to be known as ‘jazz.’ Murray cites W.C. Handy and Jelly Roll Morton as crucial transitional figures in the evolution of blues music from folk expression to something as richly complex as any art form. The natural setting for the music is the honky-tonk, dance halls, night clubs, variety shows, popular festivals and the like, where by custom and convention the percussive incantation gives rise to ‘bumping and bouncing, dragging and stomping, hopping and jumping, rocking and rolling, shaking and shouting.’ The symbolical and ceremonial aspects of honky-tonk and ballroom dancing—the down-home stomping good time that Murray calls the Saturday Night function—represents a ritual of purification and affirmation, fortified in its way by the interaction of musicians and dancers, performers and audience.

In that context of communal ritual, writes Murray, the musicians engage in a kind of contrived performance.

Blues musicians play music in the theatrical sense that actors stage a performance but also in the general sense of playing for recreation, as when participating in games of skill…they also play in the sense of gamboling, of fooling around with or having fun with. Sometimes they also improvise and in the process they elaborate, extend and refine…but what they do in all instances involves the technical skill, imagination, talent and eventually the taste that adds up to artifice…such is the overall nature of play, which is so often a form of reenactment to begin with, that sometimes it amounts to ritual…the effectiveness [of blues performance] depends on the mastery by one means or another of the fundamentals of the craft of music in general and a special sensitivity to the nuances of the idiom in particular.

Critics and commentators laud black musicians for their emotional expressiveness and their natural spontaneity, but Murray turns those notions on their head. The performance of blues-based music only seems spontaneous. To ‘play the blues’ is to proceed in terms of a very specific ‘technology of stylization,’ says Murray. Using the traditional twelve-bar chorus or stanza as the basis for improvisation requires ‘a special competence, more skill and taste than raw emotion, not natural impulse but the refinement of habit, custom and tradition that become second nature, the end product of discipline and training.’ The aesthetic technique and all the practice and rehearsals make the musical performance seems like a direct display of natural reflexes; the authenticity of any performance, however, depends not on the musician being true to his own private feelings, but on his idiomatic ease and consistency. Ultimately, writes Murray, ‘blues musicianship is more a matter of imitation and variation and counterstatement than of originality.’

Murray’s take on the idiomatic stylization of blues-based music has implications for jazz criticism. If, as Murray writes, ‘the most elementary obligation [of criticism] is to increase the accessibility of aesthetic presentation,’ then any valid critique must take into account the function of the music in the communal setting and the aesthetic technique of its performance. ‘To ignore the idiomatic roots [of the music] is to miss the essential nature of its statement, and art is nothing if not stylized statement; indeed, it is precisely the stylization that is the statement.’ Evaluation of the music is not a matter of the degree to which the music conforms to theories or formulas or rules imagined by the critic, but the consideration of how adequately it fulfills the requirements of the circumstances for which it was created. ‘Reviewers should presume to interpret and evaluate the work of blues musicians only when their familiarity with the special syntax of the blues convention is such that they are able to discern the relative emphasis each musician under consideration places on the definitive component of each idiom that is his actual frame of reference.’

The power of the music derives from the experience of the people who originated it, but the meaning of that experience has not always been well understood, says Murray.

Much is forever being made of the deleterious effects of slavery on the generations of black Americans that followed, but nothing at all is ever made of the possibility that the legacy left by the enslaved ancestors of blues-oriented contemporary U.S. Negroes includes a disposition to confront the most unpromising circumstances and make the most of what little there is to go on, regardless of the odds—and not without finding delight in the process or forgetting mortality at the height of ecstasy…it is the disposition to persevere that blues music at its best not only embodies but stylizes, extends, elaborates and refines into art. And such is the ambiguity of artistic statement that there is no need to choose between the personal implication and the social, except as the occasion requires.

And if the occasion calls for dancing, then everyone can join in. show less

I picked this up because Murray is the author for November for the American Authors Challenge, and I think I would have been better served with one of his novels. Not because I think this isn't a worthwhile read, but rather because I didn't realize quite how much brain power it was going to need and I didn't really have it to give just now. So some of my slight "heh?" here is almost certainly my fault. That said, Murray (I think) is exploring Western literary conceptions of the hero and show more discussing how they relate to the "blues idiom" and the African American blues hero. I'll confess that I was frequently at a loss as to how he was connecting the two. Not that I doubt there is a connection (there could hardly not be a connection?), but if he was making strong, explicit connections on the page, I missed them. He often seemed to jump from a discussion of Thomas Mann or Ernest Hemingway into the blues without showing how he got from one to the other. I dunno. I probably should read it again, giving especial attention to about the first thirty pages, which I got through before fully realizing how much I needed to slow down and make notes if I had any hope of getting what he was saying. I will say that the last fifteen pages or so really grabbed me--he was talking about different kinds of heroes and how they relate to the world. This section made me take notice because it set off all kinds of "Ooo, Tolkien" and "oh, Dean Winchester" klaxons in my brain. I still wasn't following the connections Murray was making, but I was making some of my own. Yay? Better than a stick in the eye, but I still feel like I largely missed his point here. show less

Although not as well known as his contemporaries James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray (1916-2013) was also a leading 20th century African American critic, essayist and novelist, who wrote six widely acclaimed works of nonfiction, in addition to co-authoring Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie, and four novels, along with numerous articles in magazines and literary journals. He was born just outside of Mobile, Alabama and after graduating from Tuskegee Institute (now show more University) in Alabama he embarked on a long teaching career in numerous colleges while honing his literary craft, serving with distinction in the U.S. Army and Air Force, and traveling widely within the United States, Western Europe and North Africa.

Murray read widely from the Western canon of 20th century American literature, and his non-fiction books and essays blended his reading with his lifelong love of the blues and jazz idioms.

His first published book, The Omni-Americans (1970), was a collection of polemicized essays that did not spare mostly White social scientists who often inaccurately miscategorized and exaggerated problems in the Black community and the Black family in the 1960s and attempted to portray Blacks as a distinctive and flawed race rather than examining the root causes of Black poverty such as lack of well paying jobs, substandard housing, inferior education and the residual effects of segregation despite federal legislation that supposedly put Blacks on equal footing as Whites. However, Blacks who played the race card and sought to prey on White guilt, or call for Black separatism or even armed violence were not spared from Murray's sharp pen, as he argued that Blacks and Whites shared many of the same values and would be best served by working towards a common good.

South to a Very Old Place, published in 1971, was Murray's second book, and it was the result of Harper's editor (and fellow Southerner) Willie Morris’s proposal that Murray return to the post Civil Rights era South, mainly to speak with established and highly regarded Southern writers and newspaper editors such as Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy and Edwin Yoder of the Greensboro Daily News. His paid Southern jaunts also allow him to revisit his old homes, Mobile and Tuskegee.

Oddly enough, Murray starts his Southern journey by going north (or, rather, to the north and east) to New Haven, Connecticut, in order to speak with Yale professor Robert Penn Warren, the Kentuckian best known for his novel All the King's Men and his essays in favor of racial integration in the South, including Who Speaks for the Negro?, a collection of interviews with civil rights leaders that was published in 1965. En route by train from New York to New Haven we are introduced to Murray's unique writing style, an extended version of Duke Ellington's “Take the A Train,” combined with a blues riff that would have made Ma Rainey proud:

"Anyway all of that is also part and parcel of something else to which you are always returning without even going as far south from Lenox Terrace as 110th Street: that interior benchmark site where things are still very much the same as they once were when you used to squint one of your whicker-bill-mocking eyes and stiffen the weather-beaten whicker-billness of your neck not only as if it were red-devil tootletoddle red but also as if it were wrinkled and stringy from too much tobacco chewing and so much white shirt-and-collar-and-tie wearing, standing with one foot forward and your whicker-bill elbows stuck out skinny, holding your back and shoulders as if you were just about to break into whicker-bill Charley Comesaw's bony butt, high instep strut as soon as the billygoat fiddles started sawing…"

Murray humorously compares Robert Penn Warren to a hillbilly insurance man from Kentucky, the type of Southern man who would ignore you as a Black man while you mock him for his country mannerisms. The two have a congenial conversation about the relations between Blacks and Whites in the Deep South, which demonstrates the sizable gulf that still separates the races, a theme that is repeated in conversations with other well meaning Southern White men of letters throughout the book.

Another theme is the repeated appearances of Uncle Remus and Aunt Hagar, two well known characters of African American folklore who were wise elderly former slaves that overcame hardship and imparted downhome wisdom to all who would listen to them.

For this reader the most interesting chapters were “Tuskegee,” where he received his bachelor's degree and taught for several years, and especially his home town of “Mobile.” He is soon recognized by former neighbors and friends, who playfully tease him about the places he has lived and his many accomplishments, but after he shows them that he is the same downhome boy of his youth, who hasn't forgotten where he came from and the people who nurtured him, he is quickly embraced and praised as one of their own who made them proud.

Although it is dated by over half a century, South to a Very Old Place provides a valuable examination of the American South shortly after the legal dismantling of segregation, as its residents adjust to this new reality, and, in returning to Mobile, Murray demonstrates that you can go home again after all. show less