The Legacy of Albert Murray, Omni-American

 

 

America’s current self-inflicted disasters — mass unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and state violence — were even more entrenched during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
 
Then, as now, Americans suffered acutely from what writer Albert Murray calls “the blues as such” a state in which “You become afflicted as if infected by some miasma-generating microbe. You feel down-hearted and uncertain. You are woebegone and anxiety-ridden.”
 
During that decade, the country perfected jazz — a homegrown form that transformed everyday difficulties into high art, as artists like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald fronted big bands in jam-packed Swing-era dance halls across the country.
 
Murray came of age back then, when brutal circumstances coincided with buoyant Modernism. That curious juxtaposition became his lifelong muse.
 
Long-revered as co-author of Count Basie’s autobiography Good Morning Blues (1985) and for his formative role in establishing Jazz at Lincoln Center, Murray, in his final decades — he died in 2013 at the age of 97 — won wider recognition as a major American writer and thinker. The Library of America produced his Collected Essays & Memoirs (2016) and Collected Novels & Poems (2018). His many talks, interviews and monographs are reappearing, including this year’s 50th anniversary republication of The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy (2020).
 
Murray was born in 1916, in Nokomis, Alabama, and raised just outside of Mobile — fictionalized as “Gasoline Point” in Train Whistle Guitar (1971) — an environment rich with workaday music: fire-and-brimstone sermons, barbershop philosophers, riffing itinerant guitarists and pianists, and thunderous freight trains.
 
Studying literature at Tuskegee Institute and later at NYU, he devoured Modernist novels that drew on musical structures, like those by German author Thomas Mann, readings that incubated his theories about jazz as an exemplary fine art form. Stationed in Morocco while in the US Air Force in the mid-1950s, he gave public talks on jazz. By then he knew it as well as anyone alive. In New York, he sat in on Duke Ellington’s recording sessions and hung out in thriving jazz venues with friend and fellow jazz fan, novelist Ralph Ellison.
 
Rereading Murray’s writings for this review felt revitalizing, the way I imagine jazz must have sounded when it defied the stifled and stifling Victorian era. Unlike much contemporary writing about art, which can easily veer into secondhand academic obscurantism, Murray anchors sophisticated ideas about art to “downhome” realities, and his steady humor cuts down cultural pretenses — characteristics that remind me of the Albert Murray I met years back in a roundtable seminar at the 92nd Street Y about his book The Blue Devils of Nada (1996), which examines the technical correspondences between jazz and Modernist literature and painting.
 
In that long-ago jam session, he had us riff on our ideas while he soloed. Recalling that the future author of The Sun Also Rises (1926) picked up his spare storytelling style from the copy manual of the The Kansas City Star as a reporter in 1917, Murray cited parallels between the crisp syncopations in Count Basie’s Kansas City stride-style piano and the rat-tat-tat tempos in Ernest Hemingway’s percussive prose.
 
These musical equivalencies inform visual art, too. Murray explores how Romare Bearden uses a jazz-derived compositional method to paint fabulist cityscapes by “vamping” his visual medium until he arrives at a pictorial “downbeat” and “first chorus,” punctuating the unfolding imagery through “intervals.” Bearden harmonizes the idiomatic “sololike” features of the city into “ensembles,” and “call-and-response” patterns linked through the artist’s “section tonalities” and “leapfrog sequences.”
 
This confidence about art as transformational, elegant play conceals the covert pessimism behind it. In Murray Talks Music, he tells former protégé, jazz great Wynton Marsalis, that suffering — “having the blues as such” — is a terminal condition. “You wake up in the morning,” he tells Marsalis, “and realize that if you really look hard at what some of your possibilities are, life is a low-down dirty shame that shouldn’t happen to a dog.”
 
The arts offer a stylized response to an existential dead end. “We invented the blues,” he tells another interviewer, “Europeans invented psychoanalysis. You invent what you need.”
 
In Murray’s view, jazz converts psychological pain and its vernacular offshoots into ritualized, polytonal, integrated music and dance. Jazz adapts and expands the written scores that the musician follows and ultimately surpasses; its best improvisers are extemporizing formalists learning from and competing with the innovations of peers, collaborators, and forerunners. Its refinements universalize the particular, dissolving personal history and psychosocial baggage, and call participants into the mythic dimension — an aesthetic realm that involves getting on the dusty dance floor.
 
When Murray brought this critical evangelism about the blues to bear on American crises over racial division and social justice, he suddenly became a public intellectual. Published in 1970, The Omni-Americans was a rebuke to American Afrocentrism ascendant during the reactionary Nixon era.
 
The book dismantles American Black separatism as a regressive, escapist fantasy that cedes the premise of white supremacy — the Balkanization of the country by race — to the nation’s bigots. Though he necessarily deploys them to make his points, misleading or reductive labels infuriate Murray, who believes that being American involves being neither wholly Black nor wholly white, while insisting that Blackness be defined as a characteristic as primarily American as whiteness has been since the country’s founding.
 
American “cryptic and submerged revolt” transcends skin pigmentation and includes Black Americans as immediate participants in the nation’s origins and evolution. Harriet Tubman is a “pioneer hero” because her intrepid Underground Railroad channels the subversive stealth that cast off colonial British rule; Fredrick Douglass is “a more heroic embodiment of the [American] self-made man” than even Abraham Lincoln.
 
And white progressives, mind your complicity in the racism you denounce. Murray indicts “white liberal do-gooders whose concern for the welfare of black people may be beyond reproach but whose opinion or esteem for them is often so low that it moves beyond condescension to contempt.”
 
Fifty years on, such liberal hypocrisy is endemic to hyper-gentrified gluten-free neighborhoods, where Black Lives Matter posters hang in the windows of pricey condos, boutiques, and galleries — stretches of real estate that once housed working-class Black families and businesses.
 
The Omni-Americans also debunks our country’s perennial, corporate-and-academe-sponsored liberal punditocracy: “third-rate polemicists” with their “social science fictions,” who enrich themselves on TV gigs and book deals promoting sociological “safari studies” and a “fakelore of black pathology” — reductive tropes that, in turn, have corrosive effects on creative culture when artists and writers (peers whom Murray names) sacrifice psychological complexity to appease white stereotypes about Black experience.
 
He warns about the danger to young Americans posed by an education system that “emphasizes conformity […], producing a nation of jargon and cliché-oriented white sheep,” even as white separatists are “armed to the teeth and on the edge of hysteria.” Backed by the “murderous hysteria of white police […], white Americans […] in the name of law and order now sanction measures […] that are more in keeping with the objections of a police state than those of an open society.”
 
He calls on those seeking justice to get over moralizing and sloganeering to be “involved with the practical requirements of government in action” and to learn the “chord structure and progression of official maneuvers,” noting that, “[t]he corporate structure of contemporary life in the U.S. is just simply not something you can ignore or verbalize out of existence.”
 
The Omni-Americans asks citizens to apply the jazz performer’s well-honed sensitivity and improvisational openness to the nation’s orchestral “score” – The US Constitution. In The Hero and the Blues (1973), he allegorizes America as Duke Ellington’s ensemble, its grandeur built on “antagonistic cooperation,” synthesizing combustible, contrarian energies into “blues extension concertos,” where the soloist:
 
[…] states, asserts, alleges, quests, requests, or only implies, while the trumpets in the background sometimes mock and sometimes concur as the woodwinds moan or groan in the agony and ecstasy of sensual ambivalence and the trombones chant concurrence or signify misgivings and even suspicions (which are as likely to be bawdy as plaintive) with the rhythm section attesting or affirming […]. He is also stylizing […] the actual texture of all human existence not only in the United States or even the contemporary world at large but also in all places throughout the ages.
 
Albert Murray Talking Modernism, Race, and Jazz. By Tim Keane. Hyperallergic, September 19, 2020. 

Whether the United States will ever fulfill its foundational promises, the “arc of history” besides, remains an open question. Our stumbling toward progress is part of who and what America is; it’s a function not only of politics and economics, but also of philosophy and imagination. We, in the first quarter of the 21st century, face abiding questions: What will be the meaning of our lives? Will we help to bring about a meaningfully better future?
 
Nearly five decades after it was first published, Albert Murray’s 1970 book The Omni-Americans ranks among the most adequate prophecies we may now look to for guidance. The book remains a lonely and powerful reality check. “To race-oriented propagandists, whether white or black, the title of course makes no sense: they would have things be otherwise,” Murray wrote in the introduction. “But the United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multi-colored people.”
 
Echoing the historian Constance O’Rourke, Murray argued that American culture is a “composite that is part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro,” the key aspect of which is resilience (exhibited in everyday life and ritualized in art). This hybrid nature wasn’t for Murray just a matter of theory or argument; it was a basic human fact:
 
       “By any definition of race, even the most makeshift legal one, most native-born U.S. Negroes, far from being non-white are in fact part-white. … None of this is really news. … And yet it is perhaps the second most persistently overlooked flesh-and-blood fact of everyday life in the United States. The first of course is the all but unmentionable but equally undeniable fact that an infinite and ever-increasing but forever hidden number of assumed white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are among other parts part-Negro. “
 
The Omni-Americans was intended as a counterstatement to “the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology,” the stories of our nation and of race that “insist that political powerlessness and economic exclusion can lead only to cultural deprivation.” In the first section, Murray targets a major source of such lore—the behavioral sciences, or what he termed, “social science fiction.” He contended that the insights that can be derived from sociology and other behavioral studies are far too superficial to yield meaning that properly defines a group of people. By its very nature, Murray argued, social science tends to turn rich and uniquely textured lives into generalized abstractions and to overemphasize the hardships of life, often by ignoring the positive qualities of a group’s way of life. The statistics, polls, and findings of social science might be factual in the sense that they can be verified, but they are insufficient for reaching a comprehensive understanding of a people, their motivations, their ambitions, or their potentials.
 
Moreover, Murray found that the mindset that justifies or takes poverty, social alienation, and political inequities for granted is also very often the starting point for social scientists. “The one place U.S. Negroes have always found themselves most rigidly segregated is not the inner sanctum of the is-white family but in the insistent categories of behavioral science surveys, studies, and statistics.” In other words, Americans are most rigidly segregated in our collective imagination.
 
Among the villains of The Omni-Americans are Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Kenneth Clarke, and the journalists and writers who amplified their findings and manner of thought; among its heroes are Duke Ellington, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.
 
For Murray, there was perhaps no greater, no more heroic, no more representative American than Ellington. In his music and in his life, the pianist and composer provided a metaphor for continuity with change—for improvisation, which yields survival. Murray put it this way:
 
    “The definitive statement of the epistemological assumptions that underlie the blues idiom may well be the colloquial title and opening declaration of one of Duke Ellington’s best-known dance tunes from the mid-thirties: “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.” In any case, when the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest, and the medicine man. He is making an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response to that which Andre Malraux describes as la condition humaine.”
 
The second section of The Omni-Americans extends the ideas and values articulated in the first section, and discusses their implications as Murray saw them in news media, academia, and contemporary art. Murray’s lament, and warning, in this section is that intellectuals and artists of all genres (and of so-called races) had begun to accept the social-science paradigm as the one which conveys the most adequate and relevant truth about America and its citizens.
 
In particular, Murray focuses on the literary output of the mid-20th century and finds it wanting for a writer to accomplish what Ellington did in music. To Murray, his friend Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man shone most brightly as a single artistic statement, and Hemingway provided a model of career-spanning excellence in blues-oriented literature. Murray called Hemingway’s writing “the literary equivalent to blues music.”

 
Murray’s 1973 book The Hero and the Blues, which he’d begun writing before The Omni-Americans was published, might be his most concise and comprehensive articulation of the blues idiom and how it is expressed in human and artistic forms besides music. In the second section of that book, he discusses a metaphor that Hemingway used to explain a part of his own approach to writing fiction: “Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged,” Hemingway wrote in Green Hills of Africa. To Murray, this metaphor suggested fundamental implications for heroic action, whether found in a book or not. It begins to articulate the dynamics of antagonistic cooperation. “The fire in the forging process, like the dragon which the hero must always encounter, is of its very nature antagonistic, but it is also cooperative at the same time,” Murray wrote. “It functions precisely to strengthen and prepare it to hold its battle edge, even as the all but withering firedrake prepares the questing hero for subsequent trials and adventures.” Sensitivity to the dynamics of antagonistic cooperation is what erodes when a person embraces social-science patterns of thought.
 
In the essay “A Clutch of Social Science Fiction Fiction,” from The Omni-Americans, Murray wrote, “Only a few American writers since the twenties have been able to create fiction with implications beyond the most obvious and tiresome clichés derived from social science. … Indeed what most American fiction seems to represent these days is not so much the writer’s actual sense of life as some theory of life to which he is giving functional allegiance, not so much his complex individual sensitivity as his intellectual reaction to ideas about experience.” Here, Murray discusses two ideas that continue to trouble us: whether so-called white people can have anything meaningful to say about race or racism, and the persistent confusion between social or political propaganda and art.
 
Taking the blues as representative of the impulse and purpose of all art, Murray wrote in The Hero and the Blues, “Precisely as white musicians who work in the blues idiom have been simulating the tribulations of U.S. Negroes for years in order to emulate such musical heroes as Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, and Duke Ellington, and such heroines as Bessie Smith and Billie Holliday, so in fiction must readers, through their desire to imitate and emulate black storybook heroes, come to identify themselves with the disjunctures as well as the continuities of the black experience as if to the idiom born.” For such a matrix of ideas to achieve real-world applicability, the images and metaphors in fiction would need to be precise enough, adequate enough, and comprehensive enough.
 
The third section of “Social Science Fiction Fiction” offers a review of William Styron’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. “The very news that a writer of Styron’s talent and determination had undertaken a novel about a Negro whose greatness is a matter of historical record (however smudged) was itself cause enough for high hopes,” Murray wrote, in a sentence that sounds strange today, when the cries of “cultural appropriation” might have discouraged Styron from writing his book. But Murray, when assessing the merits of a novel, was more concerned with artistic achievement than skin color.
 
And yet, Murray concludes, “What Southern Negroes will find in Styron’s version, alas, is not the black man’s homeric Negro but a white man’s Negro (specifically, Mister Stanley M. Elkins’) Sambo—a Nat Turner, that is to say, who has been emasculated and reduced to fit all too snugly into a personality structure based on highly questionable and essentially irrelevant conjectures about servility (to which Styron has added a neo-Reichean hypothesis about the correlation between sex repression and revolutionary leadership).” Styron’s failures, as Murray saw it, existed in the realm of form, craft, imagination, and execution; they were literary failures, not missteps related to too little ambition or too much reverence.
 
In the same way, and for the same reasons, that our contemporary culture would likely have rejected Styron’s project, we have reclaimed James Baldwin as a spokesman for the 21st century. Murray ends this middle section of The Omni-Americans with a reflection on Baldwin—in particular, two essays, which Murray treats as a literary statement of purpose, and his 1962 novel Another Country. The first essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” from 1949, discusses Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) while simultaneously rejecting literature (or any art, one assumes) that operates primarily as social or political protest.
 

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Baldwin plainly wrote, “is a very bad novel.” It was, he continued, “not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still in the same constriction. How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth?”
 
The second Baldwin essay, from 1951, called “Many Thousands Gone,” is an extension of the first in that it, among other arguments, assessed contemporary fiction in the same way that Baldwin critiqued Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Richard Wright, who was mentioned only briefly in the ’49 essay, and his novel Native Son become the central focus of this sequel of sorts. (Foreshadowing, Baldwin had already written that Bigger Thomas was “Uncle Tom’s descendant.”)
 
In his response, it wasn’t Murray’s primary goal to defend either Stowe or Wright—or, for that matter, the genre of protest fiction. In fact he tended to agree with Baldwin’s broad claims—he at least didn’t dispute them outright: “Baldwin overstated his case, of course, but many serious students of American literature were very much impressed by what they thought all of this implied about his own ambitions as a writer.” Rather, Murray’s aims seem to have been to contribute a more precise statement—about propaganda art—and, by offering a longer view of the relevant history, to define the rich tradition that Baldwin seems to have all but ignored.
 
Murray finds Baldwin’s fiction, despite the arguments against Stowe and Wright, devoid, too, of those elements that comprise fine literature. Another Country, Murray wrote, “reflects very little of the rich, complex, and ambivalent sensibility of the novelist, very little indeed, no more than does the polemical essay, The Fire Next Time.” None of this is irredeemable, though. Murray went on to say that the polemics by Baldwin and Wright—“though not likely to be epics”—“serve a very worthy cause, the cause of greater political, social, and economic freedom and opportunity for Negroes in the United States.”
 
If Baldwin hadn’t trekked to France and Switzerland with Bessie Smith albums tucked under his arm, proclaiming that he knew the blues and setting out to put them into fiction, Murray may have never found reason enough to write his essay. But as it happens, Baldwin’s essays do ask for further clarification; he began the second with the claim, “It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.” Later he wrote, “But the fact is not that the Negro has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make this tradition articulate.”
 
Murray’s response, then, was to draw attention to the (same!) tradition and set of principles that guided his own intellectual, artistic, and cultural life: the blues idiom in all its expressive forms. The blues, Murray wrote, “affirm not only U.S. Negro life in all of its arbitrary complexities and not only life in America in all of its infinite confusions, they affirm life and humanity itself in the very process of confronting failures and existentialistic absurdities.” To Murray, both Baldwin and Wright “seem to have overlooked the rich possibilities available to them in the blues tradition.”
 
So why is Baldwin—and to a somewhat lesser extent Wright—among the patron saints of 21st-century political agitations and literary ambitions? Well, Murray offered a clue to that, too:
 
“If you … reduce man’s whole story to a series of sensational but superficial news items and editorial complaints and accusations, blaming all the bad things that happen to your characters on racial bigotry, you imply that people are primarily concerned with only certain political and social absolutes. You imply that these absolutes are the sine qua non of all human fulfillment. And you imply that there are people who possess these political and social absolutes, and that these people are on better terms with the world as such and are consequently better people. In other words, no matter how noble your mission, when you oversimplify the reasons why a poor or an oppressed man lies, cheats, steals, betrays, hates, murders, or becomes an alcoholic or addict, you imply that well-to-do, rich, and powerful people don’t do these things. But they do.”
 
Baldwin, despite himself, gave a rather more succinct answer: “The necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power.”
 
It may be easy to believe—with today’s obsessions with guilt and privilege—that the messages in The Omni-Americans are directed primarily toward so-called white people. Had that been so, Murray might have become a cultural hero in the way that Baldwin and Wright have. Needless to say, The Omni-Americans, serious in its disavowal of anything like racial purity, holds African Americans to the same standards of integrity, excellence, and ambition: “The problem is not the existence of ethnic differences, as is so often assumed,” Murray wrote, “but the intrusion of such differences into areas where they do not belong. Ethnic differences are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity.”
 
In June 1966, after James Meredith was shot in the back as he embarked on his Freedom March through Mississippi, three prominent civil rights organizations—the Southern Christian Leadership Council, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality—came together to continue his sojourn. In his 1968 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that as the march continued, he overheard expressions of dissent against two basic principles of the civil rights movement: nonviolence and integration. “If one of these damn white Mississippi crackers touches me, I’m gonna knock the hell out of him,” one marcher said. “This should be an all-black march. … We don’t need any more white phonies and liberals invading our movement. This is our march,” King recalls another saying.
 
Ten days into the march, at a mass meeting in Greenwood, Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks led the crowd with the call “What do you want?” to which they chanted in response, “Black power.” There, despite the efforts of King and other members of SCLC, began the amplification of the slogan and its attendant ideological connotations.
 
The sense of loss and bitterness that pervaded the late 1960s and the early ’70s, a primary aspect of the social environment in which The Omni-Americans was published, foreshadow the tenor of much of contemporary American life. Many citizens still regard America with disappointment and bitterness; in roughly the past 10 years, the loose ideological strains under the banner that was Black Power have gained renewed energy. And almost 50 years after the publication of The Omni-Americans, the book still possesses the power to surprise, confound, and infuriate readers; to challenge deeply held beliefs; and to open new pathways of thought.
 
At this stage in American history, it is crucial, and revealing, to ask why anyone stakes their identity primarily on the basis of race. It is said that choosing not to identify as black is selfish, or a betrayal, or an evasion of history—despite the universal promises such a position holds. At its best and most sincere, however, “transcending race” doesn’t mean ignoring its history or the force it has on the lives of people all over the world, but walking and talking in terms of an idiom with universal applicability—what keeps in mind the suffering that all people face. Murray was clear about the difference between race and culture and the limits to the power each holds: What we often think of as intractable and conclusive is subject to the heroic dynamics of antagonistic cooperation. And so, for all its interest in the national experiment, The Omni-Americans is a book with cosmic relevance: The blues idiom demands a confrontation with death, the better to inspire and develop the best options for dealing with life.
 
The Omni-Americans. By  Matthew McKnight. Tablet, November 11, 2019. 

When Albert Murray died in August 2013, a friend of mine expressed surprise that his obituary had appeared on the front page of The New York Times. “He seems incredibly accomplished, a powerhouse thinker and provocative cultural critic,” she said, “but I’ve never heard of him before.”

 
As a personal friend of Murray’s, this bothered me, but, truth be told, it didn’t shock me. Murray — a prolific essayist, novelist, and critic, as well as a founding member of Jazz at Lincoln Center — is not a household name.
 
Yet in recent years, there have been symposia and other events celebrating Murray’s life and work, in addition to a growing body of literature around the writings of this Alabama native. The Library of America’s recently published Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs is an important compilation, and will surely do much to extend this trajectory, further cementing Murray’s impact on American arts and letters.
 
Co-edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and Paul Devlin, an essayist and literary scholar who teaches English at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the book is expertly organized. The beautiful hardcover edition presents Murray’s best known nonfiction writings alongside much lesser known pieces, and includes the never-before-published essay “U.S. Negroes and U.S. Jews: No Cause for Alarm.” With these latter cases, Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs gives attention to work that has remained quite underexplored by literary and cultural critics. Gates and Devlin supplement the volume with an extensive chronology of Murray’s life, notes on the background of the texts in this collection, and comprehensive endnotes.
 
Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs opens with a seminal piece, The Omni-Americans. In 1970, Murray took on black protest writers and defied establishment thinking with his claims of “a folklore of white supremacy and a fakelore of black pathology.” His brazen words challenged prevailing views on black identity and the social science behind it, and pushed back against the dialogue around black separatism that occurred through the rising Black Power movement. “[A]ny 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,” Murray writes in his typically punchy manner. He goes on to elaborate: “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto.” It’s a claim that may sound less trenchant today, but it was nothing short of audacious at the time. And on the heels of such a divisive presidential campaign, any careful reader will recognize just how relevant these observations are now to everyday American life.
 
Among the other major texts in this collection are Stomping the Blues and The Blue Devils of Nada, works of cultural criticism that provide assessments of music and artistic aesthetic. Blues music can serve, as Murray has said, as “a statement about confronting the complexities inherent in the human situation…. It is also a statement about perseverance and about resilience and thus also…about achieving elegance in the very process of coping with the rudiments of subsistence.” The Hero and the Blues, included here as well, also explores aesthetics, particularly in literature (by such authors as Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, and Richard Wright), through the prism of the blues idiom.
 
Born in Nokomis, Alabama in 1916, Albert Murray graduated from Tuskegee Institute (now called Tuskegee University), where he was a classmate of Ralph Ellison, with whom he developed a close friendship after his graduation. Murray helped to shape Ellison’s thinking on Invisible Man, the two men trading ideas and observations, and carrying their conversations well beyond the publication of Ellison’s award-winning novel. Speaking to Murray and Ellison’s shared ideologies, Gates has written elsewhere: “Both men were militant integrationists, and they shared an almost messianic view of the importance of art. In their ardent belief that Negro culture was a constitutive part of American culture, they had defied an entrenched literary mainstream, which preferred to regard black culture as so much exotica—amusing, perhaps, but eminently dispensable.”
 

Murray’s output includes not just the essays and memoirs, but novels, too. Beginning with Train Whistle Guitar in 1975, the picaresque fictions trace the development of Murray’s alter ego, Scooter, a riff-style improviser from the American South who comes of age amid complex social dynamics of the early-to-mid twentieth century. Train Whistle Guitar has even been characterized as one of the greatest African American Bildungsroman narratives. Powerful words — ones that would seem to describe a canonical writer.
 
In fact, powerful words — like seminal, bold, brilliant, influential, and decisive — are often employed in description of Murray’s writings. Still, my friend’s response upon reading his obituary was not unpredictable. The effort to establish Albert Murray — a seminal, bold, brilliant, influential, decisive thinker — as a household name continues. In recognition of Murray’s centenary, this Library of America edition is a welcomed, essential addition, celebrating a formidable, omni-American writer.
 
The Omni American Author: An Albert Murray Collection. By Lauren Walsh. Hyperallergic ,  January 22, 2017.
 

I. EXTENSION
 
The name Albert Murray was never household familiar. Yet he was one of the truly original minds of 20th-century American letters. Murray, who died in 2013 at the age of 97, was an accomplished novelist, a kind of modern-day oral philosopher, a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the writer of a sprawling, idiosyncratic, and consistently astonishing body of literary criticism, first-rate music exposition, and cunning autobiography. In our current moment of identity politics and multicultural balkanization, the publication of any new Murray text would serve as a powerful reminder that his complex analysis of art and life remain as timely as ever—probably more so.
 
A new volume of previously uncollected interviews, Murray Talks Music, painstakingly transcribed and compiled by the literary scholar and Murray disciple Paul Devlin, is worth the price of admission for its exhaustive introduction alone. Devlin’s book is both a public service and a testament to how Murray could impress and inspire those who came in contact with him. The interviews would not only interest jazz fans: Whatever the pretext, as Devlin correctly points out, “Murray always brings in the topics he was also most concerned with and also wrote about extensively: literature, visual art, social issues.” The forthcoming publication, in October, of the Library of America edition of Murray’s collected essays and memoirs, coedited by Devlin and Henry Louis Gates Jr., will prove an even greater treat, but Murray Talks Music is as good a place as any to encounter Murray’s prodigious polymath’s mind.
 
When thinking of Albert Murray, I am often reminded of a passage midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (one of Murray’s favorite novels, which he playfully dubbed Jake’s Empty Bed Blues), in which Jake Barnes and the Spanish innkeeper Montoya discuss the arrival of the bulls: “Montoya put his hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ll see you there.’ He smiled again. He always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special secret between the two of us; a rather shocking but really deep secret that we knew about.” Jake and Montoya are aficionados. To appreciate the world of bullfighting the way they do requires afición. Reading and caring about Murray can be a lot like this. To appreciate the thrilling, heretical world of Albert Murray requires something similar in his readers.
 
Such afición is not required to nearly the same degree in readers of Murray’s two closest peers in talent and subject, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. It was Murray’s odd (mis)fortune to have had his name forever linked to that of Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, who was a friend of Murray’s in college and adulthood, an aesthetic confrere, and only two years his senior. Murray was fated to spend the duration of his decades-long career toiling gamely in the shadow of Ellison’s magisterial opus, which shot his star into the firmament when he was 39. Murray didn’t even begin to freelance in earnest until he was in his mid-40s, comfortably retired from the Air Force with a pension; and his first book, the landmark 1970 collection The Omni-Americans, didn’t appear until he was in his mid-50s.
 
Before that, Murray had been living the kind of life that can be of great service to a serious thinker: traveling widely, serving his country, raising a family—all the while making up his mind about a great many questions of fundamental importance. “It is jolting to realize that he was pushing sixty when we met, and that his literary career was really just getting underway,” notes jazz critic Gary Giddins in his foreword to Murray Talks Music. But unlike Ellison, who suffered one of the saddest, longest, and profoundest cases of writer’s block in modern literary history, Murray, once he started writing, enjoyed a sustained, flourishing creativity. This latecomer quality lends his oeuvre consistency and maturity, and even a certain gratifying circularity. Like Borges, all of his books are but facets of one unending book.
 
Albert Murray’s name was never household familiar, but we already knew that. In 1996, months after Gates profiled Murray in The New Yorker (likening his work to “samizdat under Stalinism”), Sanford Pinsker published an essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review suggesting that “denial is probably the best (probably the only) way to account for Murray’s virtual anonymity as a mainstream black intellectual.” And, following his death, lamentations that we’d ignored or forgotten Murray resurfaced. At the time, Devlin himself wrote an essay for Slate called “Some Things You Didn’t Know About Albert Murray,” which points out the extent to which the man who was “as comfortable at the American Academy of Arts and Letters as he was at his Harlem barbershop” commanded the respect of all manner of distinguished figures and institutions, from Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton to Saul Bellow and Tom Wolfe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which acquired two of his amateur photographs for its permanent collection in 2005, is also up on game. And yet, Murray’s name still functions as a sort of password, announcing to like-minded souls a particular willingness to look further and stay longer, to dig a little deeper through the crates in pursuit of hidden treasures. That the broader culture hasn’t held on to Murray reveals far more about it than him.
 

II. ELABORATION

 Murray had his core obsessions: the blues and jazz music; the high-low genius of Ellington and Armstrong; the pragmatic American wisdom of Hemingway and Faulkner; the eternal narrative strength of myth and symbol; the European polish and tradition of André Malraux and Thomas Mann; the absolute primacy of form and elegance in art and life; the articulation of local custom and vernacular into a universally recognizable aesthetic statement; the yin and yang of dragons and dragon slayers, a precondition for greatness by means of “antagonistic cooperation.” As such, he had his highly particular bêtes noires, too: sociologists and other academics, whom he frequently and derisively referred to as “propaganda technicians” and “social science survey technicians”; the contorted prose and “flat-assed” whiteness of Thomas Wolfe; the intellectual callowness of black nationalists and radicals like the early Malcolm X; 
and racists of any stripe. For Murray, these thorns were all obvious manifestations of a fundamental unwillingness to confront and deal with American and human complexity and contradiction: They were attempts to confine men and women to abstract categories that erase individuality and, much more unforgivably, that forfeit the individual and collective capacity for heroism in the face of adversity. They gave him a reason to work.

 “Celebrated chroniclers of black America were shown by Murray to be tainted by the ethnographic fallacy, the pretense that one writer’s peculiar experiences can represent a social genus,” Gates observed. Or, as Murray himself quipped in The Omni-Americans: “This whole thing about somebody revealing what it is really like to be black has long since gotten out of hand anyway.” About Baldwin in particular, Murray insisted (in a vigorous essay dismantling the author of “Everybody’s Protest Novel”) that “he himself has found it expedient in his work to degrade U.S. Negro life to the level of the sub-human in the very process of pleading the Negro’s humanity.”

 But Murray was no intellectual ostrich with his head planted in the sand, pretending that, if only he refused to acknowledge the presence of American racism closing in all around him, he could somehow make it disappear. Such malevolent forces would have been screamingly obvious to any black boy born in 1916 outside of Mobile, Alabama—this May marks his centennial—and educated at 
Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, even if he knew he couldn’t change them. Rather, what Murray preferred to emphasize was that black people’s problems, while certainly conditioned by local historical circumstance, were also timelessly and irrevocably universal, capable of being described and transcended to the same extent that humans have dealt with tragedy and chased away the blues since a man calling himself Homer went about recording the exploits of his spiteful, blood-lusting neighbors. In Murray’s scheme, more often than one might suspect, “the have-nots really have, while the haves have not,” as he wrote in The Blue Devils of Nada, his 1996 masterpiece of aesthetic theory. This is far from a frivolous or flippant denial of the specificity of black pain, though it’s one reason that Murray, like his more famous protégé Stanley Crouch, is often misidentified as a conservative, a dismissive label that comes preloaded with value judgments meant to undermine the authenticity of his perspective and the depth and breadth of his learning and insight, to say nothing of his commitment to the people who produced him. In truth, for Murray, loyalty to those people is of such a basic givenness as to frequently go unstated.

 

* * *

 Because Murray’s The Omni-Americans is so obviously suffused with affinity for American blackness, it was difficult at first for me to understand, when I came to it in my 20s, the degree of discomfort it once inspired—and probably still does. There’s a political dimension to the book, as Devlin explains in Murray Talks Music: “A certain type of unthinking bourgeois white liberal recoils from Murray’s work because reading it can feel like reading forbidden thoughts—thoughts that reject the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology.” On the other hand, “Conservatives have never been too fond of Murray’s work either,” Devlin writes, “not when they actually read it, at least.” This heterodoxy is also precisely why Murray’s writing can trouble black people—after all, it destabilizes the understandable, if Pyrrhic, comfort many feel in raging against the seemingly limitless capacity of white people to oppress—and why its prescriptions and concerns remain pertinent. About the black writers of his day, such as Baldwin as well as Richard Wright, Murray refused to pull punches, arguing that “one can only hope…there are also U.S. Negro writers whose literary insights will enable them to do much more than turn out shrill, defensive and predictable counter-propaganda against the doctrine of white supremacy, as important as propaganda is.” Rather, he suggests, these writers must realize that “they have as much responsibility for representing the mainstream of U.S. life as anybody else.” One does not have to stretch very hard to sense what Murray would have made of a fashionable 21st-century memoirist’s despairing claim to his son that black Americans are and will always be those “faces at the bottom of the well.”

On the other hand, champion for genuine black equality that he was, it would not be inaccurate at all to classify Murray—like Ellison, but without any of the latter’s personal frigidity or mean-spiritedness—as a genuine elitist. He really did believe that some things were better, more significant, than others, and that learning not only to make distinctions but also to be distinctive was of the utmost existential importance. He wanted black people to transcend our oppression, to become heroic. This is the highest possible standard—a daunting order for any group, to be sure, and far beyond the “twice as good” dictum that Murray likely heard from his elders and that has come in for such a drubbing on social media today. But Murray’s thinking had nothing to do with the performance of any watered-down, middle-class “respectability politics” for the pleasure of some all-seeing “white gaze.” On the contrary, he wanted to open the minds of black Americans, with his writing and his advocacy, to their own ever-present greatness—a greatness “they might otherwise ignore,” but that he saw as evident all around them, first in the sheer and improbable feat of their survival, and second in the accompanying and eventually culturally dominant artistic expression their ancestors had discovered. He called it “the blues idiom statement,” which is to say, 
“the specific texture of existence in a given place, time, and circumstance…processed into artistic statement, stylized into significance.”
 
In one interview, Murray says that “Homo Americanus is part Yankee ingenuity, part backwoodsman/Indian or gamecock of the wilderness, and part Negro.” Here he is mostly concerned with the American character insofar as it provides the basis for an artistic lineage that might expand our capacity for right living. Contemporary usage of descriptors like “black” and “white,” drenched as they are in nonscience, mostly just get in the way. For Murray, African Americans (those people whose culture is “truly indigenous” to the United States) incorporate all the essential identities and experiences within themselves and exemplify the fundamentally mongrel nature of the land. Viewed in such a light, “the blues tradition itself is, among other things, an extension of the old American frontier tradition,” he writes in The Hero and the Blues. There is the same “seemingly inherent emphasis on rugged individual endurance. There is also the candid acknowledgment and sober acceptance of adversity as an inescapable condition of human existence—­and, perhaps in consequence, an affirmative disposition toward all obstacles, whether urban or rural, whether political or metaphysical.” This is how the blues takes on an extramusical dimension and attains the status of “equipment for living.” The blues, for Murray, is homeopathic: “When you get to the playful reenactment [of blue feelings], you’re on your way to fine art, and that’s the most effective way of dealing with the basic existential problems of human consciousness, and good feeling.”
 

“What must be remembered is that people live in terms of images which represent the fundamental conceptions embodied in their rituals and myths,” he continues in The Hero and the Blues. “In the absence of adequate images (and hence rituals and myths), they live in terms of such compelling images as are abroad at the time. Where there is no adequate vision the people perish.” Murray thought that images of blacks as wretched victims, only ever smoldering in righteous rage or wailing in ceaseless agony under the clenched fist of white supremacy, images popular in his day and again popular in ours, are irredeemably inadequate and consequently worthy of sustained and serious interrogation. It was a sore point about which he could be both humorous and acidly scathing, one that his books return to obsessively, like a tongue to a fresh scrape in the cheek.
 
Consider this passage from The Blue Devils of Nada (the italics are Murray’s): “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 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.” It’s not that Murray couldn’t believe that blacks had been victimized in the United States and elsewhere; rather, he was deeply suspicious of any oversimplified depiction that would present them as only, or even just mainly, passive recipients of cosmic injustice. Whether its authors were white or black, he was especially skeptical of the kind of images and narratives of generic black pain—and, by inference, inferiority—that always seem to whip up mountains of “guilt-ridden” white liberal attention and praise. He was deeply repulsed by the 1965 Moynihan Report (“The Negro Family: A Case for National Action”), which he deemed “a notorious example of the use of the social science survey as a propaganda vehicle to promote a negative image of Negro life in the United States.” As he wrote in The Omni-Americans, such caricatures—no matter their intent—represent “a point of view toward black experience which is essentially white.” This is one strain of Murray’s sustained interrogation that remains most urgent now. And there you can hear Murray playing the blues himself: What do we really mean by “white” and “black”?
 
“There is no scientific method by which one can establish that a measurable percentage of any given trait or given number of traits, racial or otherwise, makes some people only part-white and others all-white,” Murray writes in The Omni-Americans. He saw this truth early and more emphatically than most, growing up as he did in the household of a loving adoptive black father who could, but refused to, pass for white. What Murray discovered and could never forget was the fundamental insight that there’s nowhere good America can hope to get to when the starting point remains the illusion of race. It is not, or not simply, narratives of black pain and suffering that Murray cannot abide. It’s something far more shattering and basic: “Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.” Murray’s emperor-has-no-clothes candor can evoke fear in all Americans, because it implies that, should the truth ever be accepted, we are going to have to sacrifice something of ourselves and work at solidarity; we are going to have to find other, more challenging—­but also more gratifying!—foundations for belonging to each other. For Murray, in life as in art, conflicts and ambiguities must be accepted and faced without the illusions that divide us in order to be resolved and transcended. What it takes to achieve the fully accomplished artistic statement is also what it takes to encounter life most finely, bending chaos into form, swinging in equilibrium, improvising meaning out of sheer nada.
 

One prime image of heroism in Murray’s thought is the jazzman, a refined bluesman; in truth, the figure is genderless, as much Ma Rainey as Count Basie. With an instrument pressed to the lips, this lone and dignified figure throws fugues into the void, holding life together with grace and style under extreme amounts of pressure, and improvising—never in a random way, but rather always within a framework of deep understanding and tradition. (In the same way, Hemingway’s matador faced down rampaging death with nothing but his cape and his composure.) The challenge is necessary. There can be no dragon slayer in the absence of dragons.
 
We live in a time—and this is true in so many areas of identity outside of what we call race—in which people “find it natural enough to think in terms of frustration and compensation,” to think within an identity politics of grievance. Now more than in Murray’s day, to accentuate one’s vulnerability is a way to win admiration. “Some writers leave out almost everything that does not serve their immediate political purpose,” Murray cautioned. “Many consider complexity of circumstances and motives to be precious indulgences that can wait until a better world has been achieved.” And yet, “the sensibility of the writer must be prepared to withstand the shocks and distortions inherent in human existence.” No serious writer (or artist, or person) can afford to indulge in “easy and superficial cynicism either.”
 
Indeed, the very notion of omni-
Americanness is Murray’s greatest challenge to us all: to acknowledge and accept the character of American identity as it exists in all its fullness. Jazz at Lincoln Center was his living answer to that challenge: “How appropriate then that what amounts to a national shrine to exploration and improvisation is now being inaugurated as a world class jazz performance venue at Columbus Circle by an institution bearing the name of Abraham Lincoln.”
 
III. REFINEMENT
 
When I was in college, the Roots, the sui generis ensemble from Philadelphia encompassing all manner of black music, played a show on campus. That must have been 15 years ago now. Other than a general raptness throughout, what I can still recall is the moment toward the very end of the night, after the encore, when the band began to jam covers. They moved encyclopedically through rap and R&B staples, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, absolutely annihilated Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I was astonished. The two or three minutes they spent on that song achieved for me then what no verbal argument could. Though I’d always known in an intellectual way that rock and roll was a “black” form—the way I know that English breakfast tea is Indian—I had never felt this truth. I wouldn’t have been able to explain it this way back then, but in retrospect, the revelation that night was twofold: On the most basic level, the Roots gave the lie to the notion of fences between us, self- or otherwise-imposed; on a more fundamental level, they so thoroughly inhabited the song that they split it at the seams, unveiling to anyone paying even scant attention the deepest black beneath Nirvana’s blinding white.
 
 
Early in Invisible Man, Ellison sends his nameless protagonist through a hallucinatory day toiling in the bowels of the Liberty Paints factory, known for its patented, ultra-brilliant hue, Optic White. “Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through,” the young protagonist is told. Yet the secret ingredient, he comes to realize, is nothing other than a drop of pitch-black pigment swirled into the mix. It’s a strange and unforgettable scene, as American a metaphor as I know of, and an insight that imbues not only Invisible Man but also the entirety of the Ellison-Murray aesthetic: Try as we do to forget, they insist, we know there can be no such thing as white in the absence of black. The converse is also true. On that night, the Roots—playing with a whole tool shed’s worth of equipment for living—brought the sledgehammer out.
 
In 2014, a year after Murray died, the Roots’ protean instrumentalist and co–front man Questlove put down his drumsticks to compose an extraordinary six-part series of essays in New York magazine. He wondered whether hip-hop, the cultural ecosystem of which he is a part, and which, in all its commercial ubiquity and success, “has swallowed black culture in general,” had run its course as a useful idiomatic language for the blues people who created it. He wondered whether hip-hop is not, on balance, projecting images that degrade and delude rather than those that would clarify and propel; and in the standout third essay, which centers on the notion of “black cool,” he identified the mongrel social dialectic—antagonistic cooperation—­that accounts for the possibility of a heroic and inescapably American form of grace:
 
   “Black cool is part of society in general, part of white society. Black cool is the tip of African-American culture’s engagement with the broader white culture. Black cool only works the way it works because it’s part of a relationship…. Cool has an additional dimension, too, which is that it buys time. In an uncertain social situation, where the wrong decision can have disastrous consequences, cool lets you stay a beat behind while you settle on the path of least destruction. Taken to the extreme, cool can be sociopathic; taken to the right levels, it’s a supremely intelligent mix of defense mechanism and mirroring.”

 
Whether we realize it yet or not, the omnifarious wisdom of Albert Murray is everywhere around us, and is easier to glimpse in black musicians than writers today. It’s in Kendrick Lamar’s song “The Blacker the Berry”: “I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015” is the refrain throughout subversive verses that spew anger at what America has done to him—and, no doubt, what he’s been complicit in doing to himself. (“I’m black as the heart of a fuckin’ Aryan.”) It’s detectable in the young Jay Z, who, conjuring himself a solitary gambler in life’s casino, evinces a heroic bearing: “Faced with immeasurable odds, still I gave straight bets.”
 
Perhaps, then, it will demand an uncommonly expressive and engaged musician—a 21st-century itinerant bluesman with a pen next to his drum kit—to most vividly convey what the writers can’t, or simply won’t. “Let’s go back to the word: cool,” Questlove instructs. “Cool doesn’t mean a lack of temperature, exactly. It doesn’t mean low affect or indifference. It means cool heat, intensity held in check by reserves of self-possession.” What is his idea of cool if not the indigo stoicism of a people who are anything but feeble? It’s quintessential Murray; it’s the fifth essence beyond the material; it’s “that spirit which makes life meaningful.” Why else is Questlove’s name household familiar?
 
A Blues for Albert Murray. By Thomas Chatterton Williams. The Nation, May 16, 2016.