What do you think?
Rate this book
Collected Essays & Memoirs: The Omni-Americans / South to a Very Old Place / The Hero and the Blues / Stomping the Blues / The Blue Devils of Nada / From the Briarpatch File / Other Writings
“The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people. . . . Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.” These words, written by Albert Murray at the height of the Black Power movement, cut against the grain of their moment, and announced the arrival of a major new force in American letters. Reviewing Murray’s groundbreaking first book The Omni-Americans in 1970, Walker Percy called it “the most important book on black-white relationships . . . indeed on American culture . . . published in this generation.”
Murray’s singular poetic voice, impassioned argument, and pluralistic vision are perhaps more relevant today than ever before. For Murray’s centennial, editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin have assembled the definitive edition of his collected nonfiction, including The Omni-Americans and the five brilliant books that followed. The memoir South to a Very Old Place (1971) recounts the author’s return, in his mid-fifties, to the people and places of his Alabama youth, weaving personal encounters with several Southern writers into a richly textured report on the newly integrated South. The Hero and the Blues (1973) is a series of lectures on the trickster-hero figure in world literature and its relation to musical improvisation. Stomping the Blues (1976), a masterpiece of music criticism and perhaps Murray’s most influential work, outlines a history and aesthetics of jazz and the blues that, in the 1980s, became the foundation for programming at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the “House of Swing” that Murray did so much to establish as a founding board member.
The essay collections The Blue Devils of Nada (1996) and From the Briarpatch File (2001) enlarge upon the themes of his previous books, focusing on individual American writers, artists, and musicians. For an out-chorus, Gates and Devlin present eight previously uncollected pieces, early and late, on topics ranging from the Civil Rights movement to the definition and use of such American words as soul, stone, and jazz.
Murray’s singular poetic voice, impassioned argument, and pluralistic vision are perhaps more relevant today than ever before. For Murray’s centennial, editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin have assembled the definitive edition of his collected nonfiction, including The Omni-Americans and the five brilliant books that followed. The memoir South to a Very Old Place (1971) recounts the author’s return, in his mid-fifties, to the people and places of his Alabama youth, weaving personal encounters with several Southern writers into a richly textured report on the newly integrated South. The Hero and the Blues (1973) is a series of lectures on the trickster-hero figure in world literature and its relation to musical improvisation. Stomping the Blues (1976), a masterpiece of music criticism and perhaps Murray’s most influential work, outlines a history and aesthetics of jazz and the blues that, in the 1980s, became the foundation for programming at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the “House of Swing” that Murray did so much to establish as a founding board member.
The essay collections The Blue Devils of Nada (1996) and From the Briarpatch File (2001) enlarge upon the themes of his previous books, focusing on individual American writers, artists, and musicians. For an out-chorus, Gates and Devlin present eight previously uncollected pieces, early and late, on topics ranging from the Civil Rights movement to the definition and use of such American words as soul, stone, and jazz.
1072 pages, Hardcover
Published October 18, 2016
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Read
December 1, 2016"In releasing an omnibus of his nonfiction, the Library of America intends to make sure Murray's formidable body of work is always around to remind us that we each are more complex, more human, than anybody's sociology or ideology will ever acknowledge. But will readers retrieve these lessons? They need to; especially now, as we contend with a recent wave of unarmed black Americans dying because of excessive police force."
Gene Seymour on Albert Murray: Collected Essays and Memoirs in the Dec/Jan 2017 issue of Bookforum
To read the rest of this review, go to Bookforum:
http://bookforum.com/inprint/023_04/1...
Gene Seymour on Albert Murray: Collected Essays and Memoirs in the Dec/Jan 2017 issue of Bookforum
To read the rest of this review, go to Bookforum:
http://bookforum.com/inprint/023_04/1...
April 21, 2017
I haven’t finished the last few pieces from Collected Essays &Memoirs—I’m reading slowly, as much for the style as anything else—but feel I’ve got the gist. It’s interesting how the life’s work of this man—who published his first book at age 54 and continued to be productive into his late eighties, even published a book in his nineties—all seems of a piece, and keeps coming back to the same themes.
South to a Very Old Place, for instance, documents a tour Murray took back home through the South, connecting with cultural icons like Robert Penn Warren and C. Vann Woodward, but by far the most interesting section is when he talks about his time at Tuskegee Institute, the period when he was reading through the Western canon and forming himself as an intellectual. That is also the most interesting part of his conversation with Sanford Pinsker in From the Briarpatch File, when Murray was 81. As much as he loved black culture, and as authoritative as he was about many aspects of it, he talks again and again about his foundation in Hemingway, Mann, Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Malraux, Faulkner, Yeats, Pound, Auden; he has a whole piece, in fact, about being at Tuskegee and reading Faulkner’s work as it came out, and one of the longest single essays in the book is one called “The Storyteller as Blues Singer,” about—believe it or not—Ernest Hemingway, in which he compares Hemingway’s sentences, forged at the Kansas City Star, to the piano riffs that Count Basie played from his foundation in Kansas City jazz.
Despite the high-quality literature that African Americans have produced, including that of his good friend Ralph Ellison, who was slightly ahead of him at Tuskegee, he still feels that the primary contribution of African Americans to world culture was the blues, and his greatest cultural heroes are all musicians, people like Ma Rainey Bessie Smith, and Basie (with whom Murray co-wrote his memoirs, Good Morning, Blues), but especially Louis Armstrong and, above all, Duke Ellington, whom Murray writes about again and again and who took the blues to the level of fine art. The blues for Murray were not just an art form but reflected a way of living your life, including “the most fundamental of all existential imperatives: affirmation, which is to say, reaffirmation and continuity in the face of adversity.” He elaborates on this idea many times. “The blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Blues music is not. . . . Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance.” The blues were not just to be sung or listened to, they were to be danced to, or, as Murray would say, stomped.
And it was not just in The Omni-Americans—which I wrote about previously—that Murray expressed his impatience with social scientists and their idea of white supremacy and black pathology. He spoke repeatedly throughout his work of the fact that blacks weren’t interested in living as white people did—they were happy with the way their culture had evolved—they just wanted their share of power and money. Murray wasn’t strategic and careful in his writing on that or any other subject. He was most enjoyable when he really let himself rip. Nowhere is that more in evidence than in his long riff—I will quote only a small part—on the n-word and its various uses.
“Nor was it any less obvious that when somebody called himself or somebody like himself a nigger he was not talking about not being as good as white people or somebody rejected by himself because he is rejected by white people—not at all. He was talking about being different from white people all right, but ordinarily he was mainly talking about being full of the devil and stubborn to boot; as stubborn as a mule, mule-headed, contrary, willfully different, cantankerous, ornery, and even downright wrongheaded. When somebody said, ‘Don’t make me show my nigger’—or ‘don’t bring out the nigger in me,’ he was bragging about having the devil in his soul.”
He understood white attitudes as well, and spelled them out. “Nevertheless when you heard them saying ‘boy’ to somebody you always said mister to, you knew exactly what kind of old stuff they were trying to pull. They were trying to pretend that they were not afraid, making believe that they were not a split second away from screaming for help. When they said Uncle or Auntie they were saying: You are not a nigger because I am not afraid. If you were really a nigger I would be scared to death.”
He doesn’t avoid even the most controversial of subjects, and manages to be funny (this whole long passage from South to a Very Old Place is hilarious) even while making a serious point.
“Some folks also used to declare that the reason the white folks wanted to lynch you for being a nigger was because when all was said and done they really believed that the actual source of niggerness was between your legs. They said you were primitive because to them what was between your legs was a long black snake from the jungles of Africa, because when they said rape they said it exactly as if they were screaming snake! snake! snake! even when they were whispering it, saying it exactly as if somebody had been struck by a black snake in the thickets. Bloodhounds were for tracking niggers who knew the thickets like a black snake. When white folks called somebody a black buck nigger they were talking Peeping Tom talk because the word they were thinking about was fuck, because when they said buck-fucking they were talking about doing it like the stud-horse male slaves they used to watch doing it back during the time of the old plantations.”
I know of no one quite like Albert Murray, especially when he cuts loose, when he gives you the private knowledge that blacks have concealed from whites for so long, when he lets his sentences go like a blues musician riffing on a solo (but never seems to lose control). Collected Essays & Memoirs is full of such pleasures. At 1049 pages, the book seems never to end, and really you don’t want it to.
davidguy.org
South to a Very Old Place, for instance, documents a tour Murray took back home through the South, connecting with cultural icons like Robert Penn Warren and C. Vann Woodward, but by far the most interesting section is when he talks about his time at Tuskegee Institute, the period when he was reading through the Western canon and forming himself as an intellectual. That is also the most interesting part of his conversation with Sanford Pinsker in From the Briarpatch File, when Murray was 81. As much as he loved black culture, and as authoritative as he was about many aspects of it, he talks again and again about his foundation in Hemingway, Mann, Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Malraux, Faulkner, Yeats, Pound, Auden; he has a whole piece, in fact, about being at Tuskegee and reading Faulkner’s work as it came out, and one of the longest single essays in the book is one called “The Storyteller as Blues Singer,” about—believe it or not—Ernest Hemingway, in which he compares Hemingway’s sentences, forged at the Kansas City Star, to the piano riffs that Count Basie played from his foundation in Kansas City jazz.
Despite the high-quality literature that African Americans have produced, including that of his good friend Ralph Ellison, who was slightly ahead of him at Tuskegee, he still feels that the primary contribution of African Americans to world culture was the blues, and his greatest cultural heroes are all musicians, people like Ma Rainey Bessie Smith, and Basie (with whom Murray co-wrote his memoirs, Good Morning, Blues), but especially Louis Armstrong and, above all, Duke Ellington, whom Murray writes about again and again and who took the blues to the level of fine art. The blues for Murray were not just an art form but reflected a way of living your life, including “the most fundamental of all existential imperatives: affirmation, which is to say, reaffirmation and continuity in the face of adversity.” He elaborates on this idea many times. “The blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Blues music is not. . . . Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance.” The blues were not just to be sung or listened to, they were to be danced to, or, as Murray would say, stomped.
And it was not just in The Omni-Americans—which I wrote about previously—that Murray expressed his impatience with social scientists and their idea of white supremacy and black pathology. He spoke repeatedly throughout his work of the fact that blacks weren’t interested in living as white people did—they were happy with the way their culture had evolved—they just wanted their share of power and money. Murray wasn’t strategic and careful in his writing on that or any other subject. He was most enjoyable when he really let himself rip. Nowhere is that more in evidence than in his long riff—I will quote only a small part—on the n-word and its various uses.
“Nor was it any less obvious that when somebody called himself or somebody like himself a nigger he was not talking about not being as good as white people or somebody rejected by himself because he is rejected by white people—not at all. He was talking about being different from white people all right, but ordinarily he was mainly talking about being full of the devil and stubborn to boot; as stubborn as a mule, mule-headed, contrary, willfully different, cantankerous, ornery, and even downright wrongheaded. When somebody said, ‘Don’t make me show my nigger’—or ‘don’t bring out the nigger in me,’ he was bragging about having the devil in his soul.”
He understood white attitudes as well, and spelled them out. “Nevertheless when you heard them saying ‘boy’ to somebody you always said mister to, you knew exactly what kind of old stuff they were trying to pull. They were trying to pretend that they were not afraid, making believe that they were not a split second away from screaming for help. When they said Uncle or Auntie they were saying: You are not a nigger because I am not afraid. If you were really a nigger I would be scared to death.”
He doesn’t avoid even the most controversial of subjects, and manages to be funny (this whole long passage from South to a Very Old Place is hilarious) even while making a serious point.
“Some folks also used to declare that the reason the white folks wanted to lynch you for being a nigger was because when all was said and done they really believed that the actual source of niggerness was between your legs. They said you were primitive because to them what was between your legs was a long black snake from the jungles of Africa, because when they said rape they said it exactly as if they were screaming snake! snake! snake! even when they were whispering it, saying it exactly as if somebody had been struck by a black snake in the thickets. Bloodhounds were for tracking niggers who knew the thickets like a black snake. When white folks called somebody a black buck nigger they were talking Peeping Tom talk because the word they were thinking about was fuck, because when they said buck-fucking they were talking about doing it like the stud-horse male slaves they used to watch doing it back during the time of the old plantations.”
I know of no one quite like Albert Murray, especially when he cuts loose, when he gives you the private knowledge that blacks have concealed from whites for so long, when he lets his sentences go like a blues musician riffing on a solo (but never seems to lose control). Collected Essays & Memoirs is full of such pleasures. At 1049 pages, the book seems never to end, and really you don’t want it to.
davidguy.org
August 31, 2017
So far I have read the Omni-Americans, the reason I bought this book. Murray is consistently critical and optimistic at the same time about the role of reason in ending racism. I say "reason" because although he takes arts and humanities as a matter of course in cultural importance, and I'm guessing that the rest of the works in this collection focus on these, he basically wants to point out obfuscations and contradictions in media and education. Along with the concept of Omni-American, I liked his formulation of the 50-dimensional American. This is the goal.
July 7, 2017
World class cultural and musical criticism and appreciations. Murray makes me want to read Faulkner and Hemingway again and quotes Finnegans Wake as gracefully and knowingly as anybody. What a career! The memoir South to a Very Old Place is especially recommended.
August 18, 2023
An original and highly engaging African American writer who loved jazz and really makes you think. By the time I reached the end of this splendid Library of America volume of his non-fiction writings, Murray felt like an old friend.
Read
January 6, 2017814 M9811c 2016
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews