AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--NOVEMBER 2021---ALBERT MURRAY

c. 1970

Researching Albert Murray has been a fascinating project for me. I was totally ignorant of this amazing American before I started digging into his history for this thread.

Albert Murray was born in Nokomis, Alabama, in 1916, and raised by Hugh and Matty Murray, a working class couple who, as he accidentally discovered when he was 11, adopted him from his unwed mother, a Tuskegee student who “came up pregnant” by a man she worked for part-time. “As far as the Murrays were concerned, it was a fantastic thing that I finished the ninth grade,” he recalls, “or that I could read the newspaper.” But Albert always knew that he was destined to go on to college. He received a BA degree from what is now Tuskegee University, where he met his long time friend Ralph Ellison, as well as Mozelle Menefee, who would become his wife. He stayed at Tuskegee teaching literature until he joined the Army Air Corps in 1943, serving for the last two years of WWII, and then went to New York University to obtain his Master’s Degree in literature. In 1951, he rejoined the US Air Force, from which he retired in 1962. During his service he taught geopolitics in the ROTC program at Tuskegee, and “oversaw large scale technical operations” (I have no idea what that means!) in North Africa and the US. He also continued his studies at various universities in the US and abroad. Murray was, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a born teacher, and was known as the “Great Explainer” among his friends and acquaintances. He held multiple visiting professorships at colleges in New York, Massachusetts and Atlanta.

Although he seems to have been writing most of his life, it was not until 1970 that Murray published his first book, a collection of essays on race and American culture that set him at odds with both black nationalists and some liberal white supporters of the civil rights movement. Murray made the argument that “black culture” was an integral part of the fabric of “American culture”, neither exotic nor separate from the mainstream. “The United States is not a nation of black and white people,” Mr. Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.” America, he maintained, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts,” was a “nation of multicolored people,” or Omni-Americans: “part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian — and part Negro.” Murray has criticized or questioned the standing of a number of Black icons, including Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, B. B. King and Toni Morrison, and his reasoning warrants careful consideration. To explore this more fully, I recommend Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s profile of Murray first published in the New Yorker in 1996
and Murray’s New York Times obituary.

The Library of America has devoted two volumes to Murray’s fiction (a series of 4 semi-autobiographical novels) and his non-fiction output. But he may be better known by the general public for appearing as a commentator in the Ken Burns documentary Jazz, which first aired on PBS in 2001, than for his written work. All of his life, Murray was a student and proponent of the original music of America. He collaborated with Count Basie on the latter’s autobiography, Good Morning Blues, noting once that “for years when I wrote the word ‘I,’ it meant Basie.” In addition to the Basie autobiography, Murray wrote Stomping the Blues, an exploration of how folk forms evolve into art forms, specifically with regard to the origins of the blues and jazz, and what these forms have meant to our society since the days of slavery. He took on the myth of the Hero and his journey in The Hero and the Blues, and was an admirer of Joseph Campbell’s work on that subject. He also worked with Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch to create Jazz at Lincoln Center, and to plan its programming.

As Dr. Gates summarized in his 1996 New Yorker profile, “The twentieth century... worked a great deal into Murray’s consciousness. He was fifteen when the Scottsboro trial began, twenty-two when Marian Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial. He joined the Air Force when it was segregated and rejoined shortly after it had been desegregated. He was in his late thirties when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, when the conflict in Korea was concluded, when Rosa Parks was arrested. He was in his forties when the Civil Rights Act was passed, when S.N.C.C. was founded, when John F. Kennedy was killed. And he was in his fifties when the Black Panther Party was formed, when King was shot, when Black Power was proclaimed...this is Albert Murray’s century; we just live in it.” Murray lived and worked on into the 21st century, publishing the last of his novels, The Magic Keys, in 2005. He died at the age of 97, in 2013.

Chronological list of titles:
The Omni-Americans (1970)
South to a Very Old Place (1971)
The Hero and the Blues (1973)
Train Whistle Guitar (1974)
Stomping the Blues (1976)
The Spyglass Tree (1991)
The Blue Devils of Nada (1996)
The Seven League Boots (1996)
Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000)
Conjugations and Reiterations: Poems (2001)
From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity (2001)
The Magic Keys (2005)

I wouldn't be me (and you'd all be terribly disappointed if you caught me) if I failed to mention that Murray greatly admired William Faulkner.

I do love a peak into a writer's room.

Albert is new to me. I might see if I can get my hands on his first novel.

ETA: OK, I sprang for LOA collected novels.

>2 Caroline_McElwee: That LOA volume is what I have, Caroline. I'd like to get the essay collection too, though, as I think his non-fiction is going to be very interesting.

>3 laytonwoman3rd: I did eye it Linda, as like you I suspect I'll enjoy it. Thought I'd give the novel's a go first. At least the first this month.

As it happens, I was entitled to a free volume from LOA for renewing my membership last month, and there wasn't anything on the "choose from these" list that I don't already have. So yesterday I e-mailed the membership director asking if I could request Murray's Collected Essays and Memoirs as my complimentary volume. I have been assured they will be happy to send it to me post haste!

>5 laytonwoman3rd: Result Linda.

My plan is to exchange Albert Murray for George Lewis' A POWER STRONGER THAN ITSELF.
Both write extensively about Black Music, yet George Lewis offers a more expanded vision.

>1 laytonwoman3rd: Great summary of Murray, Linda. Thank you. A very interesting man.

I've been a spotty participant in the Challenge in the last couple of years. The review you posted on your thread about the Attica Locke you read turned me, sorry to say, to play the Wild Card I have close at hand. (See the October thread.) I was going to duck out of Albert Murray too, but your introduction to him, Linda, changed my mind. Have to see what I can find.

>7 m.belljackson: That's a good choice for a substitution, Marianne.
>8 Caroline_McElwee: Thanks, Caroline. He intrigues me, and I'm looking forward to reading him.
>9 weird_O: Well, then, my work here is done! *dusts off hands*

I am in, having ordered a Murray three-pack from Amazon, promised for Sunday delivery.

>10 laytonwoman3rd: It Will be welcome to read reviews of Albert Murray's novels.

He sounds like a writer who would enjoy the results of recent Ancestry.com and 23&Me DNA studies.

Some (many?) have revealed that people who look "obviously" Black have DNA which places them in the "White" category.

I am ready! The books I ordered arrived and sit on the ottoman. The Hero and the Blues, The Omni-Americans, and Stomping the Blues. Haven't decided on the order or reading (or even IF I'll read all three).

I just finished The Hero and the Blues. I got on with it... fair to middling.

Here's my review, which is also at my thread:

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 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.

>14 lycomayflower: Well done. Read this. It may help. "No dragons, no heroes". Best quote of the year.

I'm about a third through Train Whistle Guitar, but got distracted. Will get back to it next week.

I'm finding Albert a tough nut, and am getting my best sense of his intellect and philosophy through the Conversations with Albert Murray compilation of interviews and articles based on meetings. He's well worth tackling, and I do hope to get to Train Whistle Guitar myself fairly soon. I love the Ole Miss Conversations series. I find them useful for authors new to me, and absolutely essential for those who are or are becoming my favorites. Murray is a deep well, and his lifetime of reading, thinking, writing, immersion in the jazz world, and communing with an array of brilliant friends make for some seriously wonderful discussions. I've read very little of his actual output yet, and it will take concentration and a clear head, but I'm going to enjoy the journey.

I'm finding Albert a tough nut, wrote Linda just a week ago. Me too. I'm only half through Stomping the Blues, and the light at the end of the tunnel seems as tiny and dim as it ever has. If I don't wave the white flag, I may never get to another book.