Albert Murray

Murray, Albert .(b. 1916), essayist, novelist, and cultural critic. Albert Murray's contribution to African American literature has established the value and importance of the blues idiom as the basis for approaching life as an African American. Whether writing fiction, social essays, book reviews, memoirs, aesthetic theory, or music criticism, Murray performs like the best-trained jazz musician. In his essays, Murray turns the basic beliefs of “social science fiction” inside out, exposing and playing on their assumptions just as Billie Holidaycreated soul-stirring art out of trite popular tunes. In his fiction, Murray draws from the modernism of Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and William Faulkner in order to interpret the basic raw materials of growing up African American in the South, creating a style as innovative as the harmonically and rhythmically complex improvisations of Charlie Parker. When his career is examined as a whole, Albert Murray seems similar to Duke Ellington, a modern composer for the entire orchestra of literary genres, capable of creating material suitable for the brassy tonalities of topical journalistic debate, the more somber muted timbres of philosophical reflection, and the soaring glissandos of the memoir and the bildungsroman. Murray's work in each of these genres is motivated by the hard-driving assertive rhythm section of a single idea—that the blues idiom represents an entire set of cultural equipment for living, an expansive range of styles and attitudes and possibilities for creating meaningful art, and a strategy for survival and even victory over racism in American society.

Born in Nokomis, Alabama, on 12 May 1916, Murray received his BS from Tuskegee Institute in 1939. He joined the air force in 1943 and retired with the rank of major in 1962. During his period in the service, Murray earned his MA from New York University (1948) and taught literature and composition to civilians and soldiers both in the United States and abroad. The Omni-Americans (1970), Murray's first book, contains reviews, essays, and commentaries that engage and challenge the predominant frameworks within which matters of race and culture were then being discussed. Critiquing what he called “the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology,” the book argues that all Americans are multicolored and that social scientific attempts to explain black life in America are fundamentally mistaken. His next book, South to a Very Old Place (1971), extends that argument with a series of memoirs, interviews, and reports that document the positive nurturing aspects of the African American community in the South. In 1972, Albert Murray was invited to give the Paul Anthony Brick Lectures on Ethics at the University of Missouri. These lecturers were published as The Hero and the Blues (1973). Here Murray develops his concept of literature in the blues idiom, a theory he eloquently practiced in the novel Train Whistle Guitar (1974), which won the Lillian Smith Award for Southern Fiction. The hero of this novel receives from his family and neighbors in the segregated South the cultural equipment necessary for leading a successful life—a sense of fundamental individual worth combined with community responsibility akin to the relationship between the improvising jazz soloist and the supporting band. In 1976, Murray turned the concept of the blues idiom back on itself, writing perhaps the best book ever published on jazz aesthetics, Stomping the Blues. Murray collaborated with Count Basie on his autobiography, Good Morning, Blues (1985), and in 1991 published The Spyglass Tree, the long-awaited sequel to his first novel. A catalog essay on the paintings of Romare Bearden (Romare Bearden, Finding the Rhythm, 1991), extends Murray's concepts of improvisation, rhythm, and synthesis even to the realm of the visual arts. Blue Devils of NADA (1996) contains further meditations on blues and jazz greats, while Murray's third novel, The Seven League Boots (1996), brings the hero of Train Whistle Guitar and The Spyglass Tree to maturity as a bass player in a touring jazz band.

For Murray, the blues idiom functions like classical tragedy, as a means for making the best out of a very bad situation. Like tragedy, the blues idiom contains a stylistic code for representing the most difficult conditions, but it also provides a strategy for living with and triumphing over these conditions with dignity, grace, and elegance. As in any highly developed aesthetic form, the blues idiom enables the artist to transform stylistically the grit of raw experience into art of tremendous and subtle beauty. But the blues idiom is distinguished from tragedy in that it has grown out of the specific historical experiences of, and the cultural resources developed by, African Americans. Whether made manifest in literature, the visual arts, or music, the blues idiom challenges and affirms an individual's basic humanity and higher aspirations “in spite of the fact that human existence is so often mostly a low-down dirty shame.”

Bibliography

• James Alan McPherson, “The View from the Chinaberry Tree,” Atlantic 234 (Dec. 1974): 11, 88, 120–123. John Wideman, “Stomping the Blues: Ritual in Black Music and Speech,” American Poetry Review 7.4 (1978): 42–45. Elizabeth Schultz, “Albert L. Murray,” in DLB, vol. 38, Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, eds. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 1985, pp. 214–224.
• John Gennari, “Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies,” Black American Literature Forum 23.3 (Fall 1991): 449–523.
• Warren Carson, “Albert Murray: Literary Reconstruction of the Vernacular Community,” African American Review 27.2 (1993): 287–295.
• Roberta S. Maguire, Conversations with Albert Murray, 1997.—Barry Shank

novelist; essayist; biographer; philosopher; air force officer

Personal Information

Born Albert Lee Murray in Nokomis, Alabama, on June 12, 1916; raised in Mobile, Alabama area. Married Mozelle Menefee, May 31, 1941, one child.
Education: Graduated from Mobile County Training School; Tuskegee Institute, B.S. in education with much literature study, 1939; postgraduate work, University of Michigan, 1940, Northwestern University, 1941; New York University, M.A., 1948; University of Paris, Paris France, postgraduate study, 1950.
Military/Wartime Service: U.S. Air Force, 1943-62; reached rank of major.

Career

Writer and educator. Taught at Tuskegee Institute, 1940s-50s; trained Tuskegee Airmen during World War II; moved to New York City, early 1960s; published numerous essays, 1960s; published first book, The Omni-Americans, a collection of essays, 1970; published trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels: Train Whistle Guitar, 1974; The Spyglass Tree, 1991; The Seven League Boots, 1996; worked with Count Basie on Basie's autobiography, early 1980s; published several volumes of essays and musical criticism; numerous visiting lectureships at various colleges and universities, 1970s-90s.

Life's Work

A well-known author and essayist, Albert L. Murray has been called, according to Malcolm Jones, Jr. in Newsweek, one of the "most influential cultural figures" of the twentieth century. Murray's writings cover a variety of subjects, most notably his focus on African-American culture and music. Although most clearly identified as a spokesperson for African-American culture and widely acknowledged as one of black America's foremost thinkers, Murray himself rejected that label, pointing out that his skin is brown, not black (he prefers the designations "Negro" or "colored"), and that all Americans, black and white, share a common culture. He has called himself simply an American writer. According to Murray, that common culture is most eloquently expressed in blues and jazz music; somewhat like writer Amiri Baraka, who characterized black Americans as a "blues people," Murray identified a "blues idiom" that gives Americans the spirit and wit to overcome adversity.

In novels, essays, travel narratives, poems, and other forms, Murray has expressed his ideas with at least three mutually reinforcing levels: he writes, in the broadest sense, about the blues, in a style that resembles the blues, creating works that embody what he sees as a blues aesthetic of survival, perseverance, and a positive spirit in the face of difficulty. The writer who has created this complex style took much of a lifetime to forge it; he did not publish his first book until his sixth decade.

Albert Lee Murray was born to a single mother in Nokomis, Alabama, on May 12, 1916. He was taken in and raised by a couple in the Magazine Point neighborhood of nearby Mobile, and his teachers recognized him as uncommonly intelligent while he was still a young child. Murray was sent to the Mobile County Training School, an institution whose strong-willed and oratorically gifted teachers were the source of an influence Murray has often acknowledged.

Attended Tuskegee Institute

Murray moved on to the flagship of the pre-integration system of black higher education in the South: the Tuskegee Institute. He studied the classics of European literature and received a bachelors degree in education there in 1939. Of special influence during this time were the works of Austrian novelist Thomas Mann, who incorporated the music of classical composers Beethoven and Wagner into his mode of storytelling.

After doing graduate work at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University, Murray returned to Tuskegee, teaching English there for many years and also joining the U.S. Air Force. He became one of the trainers of the Tuskegee Airmen who distinguished themselves during World War II. Murray himself spent time in the great capitals of Europe during a stretch when he was stationed in Morocco; he studied at the University of Paris for a time. While stationed in the northeastern United States he completed an M.A. at New York University in 1948.

After retiring from the military with the rank of major in 1962, Murray moved with his wife and family to New York's Harlem neighborhood and turned to writing in earnest. His first book, The Omni-Americans (1970), collected essays he had published during the 1960s. In these writings Murray emphasized the idea of an American culture composed of a unique mixture of elements, taking sharp issue both with black separatists and with the predominant white sociological writings of the day that emphasized only grim pathologies in the black experience. Murray then published the travel narrative South to a Very Old Place (1972), an account of a trip he made to his hometown of Mobile, with side visits to Tuskegee, Memphis, and other locales; the book, containing vivid descriptions of Mobile's black community, embodied Murray's original and very musical prose style.

Penned Autobiographical Trilogy

Murray's other writings of the 1970s included the first novel of an eventual autobiographical trilogy, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), which depicted the coming-of-age of an intelligent Mobile youth named Scooter. The other two works of the trilogy followed Scooter to Tuskegee (The Spyglass Tree, 1991), and into a swing-era jazz band (The Seven League Boots, 1996); Murray considered himself a fiction writer foremost. For many years, however, music came to the fore in his writing.

In such books as The Hero and the Blues (1973) and Stomping the Blues (1976), the second of which won the music industry's Deems Taylor Award for music criticism, Murray expressed his ideas about the place of blues and jazz in American culture. According to him, the "blues hero" is not simply a musician but the embodiment of black experience and values. Murray also regarded improvisation within a framework of a communal tradition as critical to the spirit of confrontation that resulted in the improvement of the conditions of black life in America. In other works, such as The Blue Devils of Nada (1996), he argued that the blues animated the spirit of American life itself, offering inspiration not only to African Americans beset by racism, but to anyone troubled by the lack of meaning in modern life.

A passage from The Blue Devils of Nada illustrates Murray's unique style, seemingly composed by turns of Southern down home speech and European didactic argument. In this passage, he argues that a complete realization of the blues attitude towards life is not only necessary for blacks but for any group of people. He says that, "a fully orchestrated blues statement" is "a fundamental device for confrontation, improvisation, and existential affirmation: a strategy for acknowledging the fact that life is a lowdown dirty shame and for improvising or riffing on the exigencies of the predicament." In general, Murray states, suffering is a given, but can be overcome. "To protest the existence of dragons (or even hooded or unhooded Grand Dragons for that matter) is not only sentimental but naive," he concluded.

Worked with Count Basie

Murray put his interest in music to work in practical realms in the 1980s, taking a decade off from his own writings to work with jazz bandleader Count Basie on his autobiography, Good Morning Blues (1985). He helped found and served on the board of directors of the Jazz at Lincoln Center concert series, a major institution that presented jazz as an art form comparable to classical symphonic music or opera. In the 1990s, approaching his 80th year, Murray once again began to write prolifically despite being slowed by a series of spine operations.

In addition to the second and third Scooter novels and The Blue Devils of Nada, Murray published a volume of poetry, Aubades: Epic Exits and Other Twelve Bar Riffs (2001), a new book of essays, From the Briarpatch File (2001), a collection of letters he had exchanged with his Tuskegee contemporary Ralph Ellison, and an art exhibition catalogue devoted to the work of his friend Romare Bearden. Late in life, Murray was feted with a parade of honorary doctoral degrees, one of them from his alma mater of Tuskegee. He was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics' Circle in 1996.

Awards

Selected: Lillian Smith Award for fiction, for Train Whistle Guitar, 1974; ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for musical criticism, for Stomping the Blues, 1976; National Book Critics' Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, 1996; numerous honorary doctoral degrees.

Works

Selected writings

• The Omni-Americans, 1970 (essays).
• South to a Very Old Place, 1972 (travel narrative).
• The Hero and the Blues, 1973 (music criticism).
• Train Whistle Guitar, 1974 (novel).
• Stomping the Blues, 1976 (music criticism).
• Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie, as Told to Albert Murray, 1985.
• The Spyglass Tree, 1991 (novel).
• The Seven League Boots, 1996 (novel).
• The Blue Devils of Nada, 1996 (music and philosophy).
• (Editor, with John F. Callahan) Trading Twelves: Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, 2000.
• Aubades: Epic Exits and Other Twelve Bar Riffs, 2001 (poetry).
• From the Briarpatch File, 2001 (essays).

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Novelists, 7th ed., St. James, 2001.
• Contemporary Southern Writers, St. James, 1999.

• African American Review, Summer 1993, p. 287; Spring 1999, p. 168.
• American Heritage, September 1996, p. 68.
• New Republic, February 3, 1992, p. 39.
• Newsweek, February 5, 1996, p. 60.
• Publisher's Weekly, February 26, 1996, p. 78; September 24, 2001, p. 91; October 1, 2001, p. 46.

• Contemporary Authors Online, The Gale Group, 2001. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Gale, 2001, http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC.

— James M. Manheim

Albert Murray may refer to:

• Albert Murray (writer) (born 1916), African American literary and jazz critic, novelist and biographer
• Albert Murray, Baron Murray of Gravesend (1930–1980), British Labour Party politician, Member of Parliament 1964– 1970
• Bert Murray (born 1942), English football player

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