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Through Murray, I know that the triumph and meaning of jazz and blues in the twentieth century and beyond are as monumental as the building of pyramids in ancient times.

“Why are you putting me with those guys?” an incredulous Albert Murray exclaimed to me, a confused young Black American intellectual who also happened to love jazz. With fear and trembling but with the exuberance of youth, I called Mr. Murray to ask him to participate in a book project. I envisioned a work in which I would interview him, Lerone Bennett Jr., and John Henrik Clarke and detail their influence on Afro-American thought.

For me, back then in the mid-1990s, the three men reflected varying streams in Black American intellectual life: Murray, the pro-American aesthetic philosopher of jazz and the blues; Bennett, a Black American historian, editor of Ebony magazine, and political theoretician whose book The Challenge of Blackness I found compelling; and Clarke, a black nationalist folk historian, beloved in Harlem for centering African identity as a source of proud origin. While these descriptions are somewhat precise, I later realized that I proposed such a project to resolve a tension within myself over how to evaluate history, culture, and politics in relation to my people’s struggle. I also eventually understood why Murray was wary of my book idea, given his emphasis on cultural excellence over racial essentialism and the perennial power of art over rigid ideology and politics.

My intellectual confusion over the best vision and strategies for Black American advancement might be attributed to the era of my upbringing. I was born the year of JFK’s assassination and was a tiny tyke during the civil rights and Black Power movements. I came into my intellectual awareness during the 1970s when the embers of black political radicalism and black nationalism were still flickering. By the time I entered college in 1981, those radicals and nationalists and their ideas had largely taken cover inside the academy. My extracurricular study included listening to Malcolm X’s and Louis Farrakhan’s fiery speeches. 

I became aware of the work of Albert Murray only after graduating from Hamilton College in 1985. I had been enamored with jazz since my sophomore year at Tottenville High School, when I was greatly moved by my peers’ stage band performance. I was so inspired that I began playing alto sax. By the time I began studying Mr. Murray’s work (and the oeuvre of his friend and fellow Tuskegee student Ralph Ellison), I’d been listening to jazz avidly for over a decade. Even so, I remained intrigued by black nationalism as a source of resistance and self-determination in the face of the horrific legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. It’s also true that my love of the playing of jazz saxophonists racialized as white, such as Phil Woods, Paul Desmond, and Zoot Sims, precluded my ever becoming an anti-white racist. However, I still flirted with notions such as the black roots of ancient Egypt and Egypt being the fount of Western civilization. I even visited Murray once, wearing a jacket with an African mud cloth print—wrong move.

He ribbed me mercilessly. 

“Man, don’t you know that when Nelson Mandela comes to the United States, he wears a Western suit?” 

“I’m the one who got Stanley Crouch out of his dashiki!” 

“Don’t you know that we follow Greenwich Mean Time?” 

After hearing and thinking about such comments, I slowly understood what time it really was. Fashion statement aside, Murray was implying that it was foolish to think of Black American culture as primarily originating in Africa. On the contrary, a Black American orientation to time, power, and style, as with most Americans, is Western, rooted in modernity, with a predominant European influence.

Murray was implying that it was foolish to think of Black American culture as primarily originating in Africa. On the contrary, a Black American orientation to time, power, and style, as with most Americans, is Western, rooted in modernity, with a predominant European influence.

As a longtime educator who taught at several colleges and universities, Mr. Murray put up with my confusion. He spent many hours with me in person and on the phone because he knew I adored jazz, was a serious student of Black American culture, and was a budding writer. During one of these conversations, he referred me to a close friend and protégé. “You should reach out to Michael James. He’d kick your ass. Unlike some people masquerading as jazz critics, he actually knew those artists.”

Mike sure did. As Duke Ellington’s nephew, he hung out and traveled with the Ellington Orchestra back in the late fifties as a teen. Johnny Hodges was his godfather. Mike was in the studio for Duke’s 1962 recording with John Coltrane when, as he recalled, Coltrane’s interpretation of “In a Sentimental Mood” greatly impressed Hodges, the saxophonist most identified with performing that song in previous decades. Mike seemed to know all the legends of jazz personally. During our conversations, I would marvel at how, no matter whom I mentioned, he’d say where they were from and provide biographical and musicological details that contextualized their artistry. He was also extremely well-read on American and world history and literature and was a lay specialist in Black American culture to boot. Mike took me deep into the historical, literary, and cultural woodshed regarding the blues idiom tradition of affirming life and confronting its ups and downs through wise improvisation. Mike loved to quote this passage from the conclusion of Murray’s The Hero and the Blues

. . . perhaps above all else the blues-oriented hero image represents the American embodiment of the man whose concept of being able to live happily ever afterward is most consistent with the moral of all dragon-encounters: Improvisation is the ultimate human (i.e., heroic) endowment.

Mike also helped me clarify the African past that Afrocentrists romanticized. As a continent with many peoples and languages, there isn’t one African culture per se. After he urged me to read The History of the World by J.M. Roberts, I became aware of the sweep of human civilizations and the extent of slavery in human societies for millennia. Regarding chattel slavery across the Atlantic, Mike referred me to Hugh Thomas’ magisterial The Slave Trade, which detailed not only the treachery of “the Portuguese, the English, the French, the Spaniards, the Dutch, and the North Americans” but also of the African monarchs and merchants who participated in the trade on the coasts of the African rivers that course into the Atlantic. As written on the jacket cover

Hundreds of thousands of Africans participated in the trade, but especially the kings in Ashanti, Dahomey, Benin, Loango, Congo, and Angola. . . Slavery in Africa resulted from captivity in war, from kidnapping or raids on neighbors, or sometimes from judicial decisions after crimes.

So, Mike did kick my butt intellectually on many occasions—often referencing the work of Murray, the man he called “The Professor”—but somewhat more gently than Murray did! Yet the greatest contribution Mike made to my intellectual development, other than graduate-level conversations on the work of writers such as Melville, Whitman, Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, Mann, Malraux, Dostoevsky, Constance Rourke, and Kenneth Burke, was his description of what I call the Ellison-Murray Continuum. 

This continuum of cultural and aesthetic insight grounds the blues and jazz as not only grand musical contributions by Afro-Americans but also as embodiments of our lifestyle and philosophical orientation as Americans. Blues music helped us face adversity and the tragic dimensions of the human condition without resigning ourselves to pessimism and a victim mentality. Blues and jazz remain “triumphant music” that can help us strive with hope and optimism for a better day. When asked to define the blues idiom, Murray responded:

It’s an attitude of affirmation in the face of difficulty, of improvisation in the face of challenge. It means you acknowledge that life is a low-down dirty shame yet confront that fact with perseverance, with humor, and, above all, with elegance.

Albert Murray taking the time to explain his heroic aesthetic philosophy, which argued for the universal value of blues, jazz, and Black American culture to and in the West, and introducing me to his dear friend Michael James, are two of the many gifts he granted me over the years. He also sharpened my fuzzy thinking on culture and history, which in The Omni-Americans he described as “a quest for a basis for consistency, a benchmark for further explorations.”

I recall sitting in his Harlem “spyglass tree,” his living room full of hundreds of books. With Murray facing me from his desk, I told him I had heard yet another protégé, Wynton Marsalis, speak on a television program. He asked me what I thought. Murray boomed when I gave a perfunctory answer: “MAN, how precise was he? That’s the key: precision.” 

That same lesson applied on another occasion when I asked him what he thought about the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. He asked me, “What do you know about that?” I gave what I considered a basic journalistic summary. He said, “No. That’s a poor reading. Here’s what happened”—and gave me a nuanced history lesson.

Sometimes, I’d read passages from other writers to Murray to get his impromptu response. When the passages didn’t meet his standards of depth and insight, he’d let me know straight, no chaser. Yet on one sunny afternoon, I read the following from economist Hazel Henderson’s The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics (1988) to Murray:

Competition and cooperation are both appropriate strategies under certain circumstances and nature employs both equally and in balance. . .  Rather than whether an economy is socialistic, market-oriented or mixed (as most are), it is more relevant to know to what extent it is organized cybernetically to take advantage of feedback, not just in the form of prices . . . but also feedback from voters (i.e., democracy) and from nature (such as acid rain or climate change.)

The more a society is structured to use a variety of these multi-dimensional feedbacks—to learn from them, modify structures, behavior patterns, as well as values—the better they can also adapt to new conditions and survive.

“Now that I agree with,” Murray said, likely feeling an affinity for the quote’s texture of cooperative opposition and self-organizing feedback loops in human life and nature. It felt terrific to merit his approval. 

Although Murray was fond of giving impromptu dissertations on a wide range of subjects, including, for instance, entropy and the implications of Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, he wasn’t interested in just hearing his own voice. As should be clear above, he’d often ask what you know about a topic and use your response as the basis to deepen your perspective while freely sharing his knowledge and wisdom. Since he had dealt with and resolved many of the issues I was grappling with fifty or more years before our conversations, his accessibility and forbearance remain a wonder to me. At heart, along with being a great American writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and an aesthetic theorist of the first order, Albert Murray was a patient teacher.

At heart, along with being a great American writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and an aesthetic theorist of the first order, Albert Murray was a patient teacher.

I learned so much from him personally and through his books that I’ll be forever indebted. Through Albert Murray, I refined my thinking and removed my African garb, replacing a misguided focus on African origins with a much deeper appreciation for the cultural and historical context of my own land, America, and my Afro-American ancestors’ contributions to it. Through Murray, I know that the triumph and meaning of jazz and blues in the twentieth century and beyond are as monumental as the building of pyramids in ancient times.

Albert Murray, the philosopher of blues-idiom wisdom, “trades fours” with Plato and Nietzsche on changes in the modes of music.

True liberals today have no more pressing duty than to counteract the perverted liberalism which contends “that just to live, securely and happily, and protected… is man’s simple but supreme goal” and which forgets quality, excellence, or virtue.

Leo Strauss, “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy”

Writer, critic, poet, and self-declared “all-purpose intellectual,” Albert Murray (1916-2013), interpreted his life in story-book terms. Given up for adoption at birth during Jim Crow and raised by his adoptive parents just outside of Mobile, Alabama, little Al did not consider himself to be abandoned or a victim. Instead, the dark-skinned hero-in-waiting felt chosen. 

It took time for little Al’s heroic task to mature.  Albert-the-schoolboy earned a BS at Tuskegee University before serving in the U.S. Air Force from 1943-1962, retiring with the rank of major. Along the way Major Murray earned an MA in literature at NYU on the GI Bill and developed a life-long friendship (and later, a low-burning rivalry) with his Tuskegee upperclassman, Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man. 

In 1970 at the ripe age of fifty-four, Albert Murray published his first book, The Omni-Americans, a lucid, combative and entertaining collection of essays in which Murray stepped on the scene like a gun-slinging hero from the intellectual-spiritual frontier shooting down racial essentialists left and right:

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite . . . Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black people and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.

Seeing through “traditional antagonisms and obvious differences” to a deeper Omni-American reality, Murray likewise rejected the social science fiction that Black Americans are psychologically deformed. Speaking from experience, Murray saw quintessential Americans who often “live with gusto and a sense of elegance that has always been downright enviable,” and he recommended jazz instead of social science for a more accurate depiction of the sense of life that he knew from the inside. Murray heard in the music a reflection of his heroic mode, elaborating, extending and refining the blues into high art, “Jazz is a fully orchestrated blues statement.”

To be clear, “The blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Blues music is not.” Blues music and the fully orchestrated blues statement, jazz, stomp the “blue devils” causing chaos and misery in our lives. Hence the title of Murray’s classic study, Stomping the Blues. Stomp is the name of a dance, and through blues music we stomp the blues feeling. 

But the blue devils are only standing by, so it’s only a matter of time before the hero will need to step on stage again. No amount of technological or political progress can change the fundamental fact that “life is at bottom… a never-ending struggle,” a principle that Murray embraced because 

heroism… is measured in terms of the stress and strain it can endure and the magnitude and complexity of the obstacles it overcomes. Thus difficulties and vicissitudes which beset the potential hero on all sides not only threaten his existence and jeopardize his prospects; they also, by bringing out the best in him, serve his purpose. They make it possible for him to make something of himself.

The heroic mode of Murray’s work is foreign to the spirit of the contemporary academy, but leading artists and writers like Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch thoroughly assimilated his thought, and Murray and his students shaped the founding of one of America’s premiere cultural institutions, Jazz at Lincoln Center. 

The heroic mode of Murray’s work is foreign to the spirit of the contemporary academy, but leading artists and writers like Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch thoroughly assimilated his thought, and Murray and his students shaped the founding of one of America’s premiere cultural institutions, Jazz at Lincoln Center. 

Creating a vocabulary that interprets jazz in terms of the hero’s journey, Murray consciously aspired to shape the contours of American culture, “We’ve got Louis, Duke, Count and Ralph, and now we’re trying to do it with Wynton and Stanley. That’s all we are – just a bunch of Negros trying to save America.” A funny punch-line animated by a serious intent.

All that said, Murray was no naïve romantic. He was learned, and he was experienced, and he knew that music is not good, simply. Music is an ambiguous power:

As much as we like jazz and as much as I use it, I never forget… [that] music is politically suspect.… You can have just as good musicians playing for Nazis as playing for freedom.

The awareness of music’s problematic power coupled with Murray’s intention to use jazz to inform the shape of American culture places him in venerable company. There is an old tradition dating back to the Hebrew Bible, Plato and Aristotle, and transmitted to us via the modern rebels against modernity, Rousseau and Nietzsche, that takes seriously the power of music to shape the character of individuals and political communities. This tradition is not taught in the academy today, but like music itself, it takes you straight to soulful depths. When we embed Murray’s thought in this history of conversations about music, we better understand what is great both in jazz and in Murray. Ipso facto, we see a vision of American greatness. And after listening to the deep talking to the deep, we will be able to return to the surface and hear some of the unheroic sounds of contemporary American life more distinctly.

 

Rhythm or Chaos

In a 1959 letter to Ralph Ellison, Murray related a strange conversation with Norman Mailer, the hipster-writer and champion of emancipated sexuality. “I pointed out,” Murray wrote, “that jazz represented CONTROL not abandon.”

Control, in the sense of self-control, getting one’s self together and staying cool, is a leading term in Murray’s thought. As he wrote in Stomping the Blues:

Blues-idiom merriment is not marked either by the sensual abandon of the voodoo orgy or by the ecstatic trance of a religious possession. One of its most distinctive features… is its unique combination of spontaneity, improvisation, and control. Sensual abandon is, like overindulgence in alcohol and drugs, only another kind of disintegration.

The self-control that maintains equilibrium while ascending through pain plus tricky circumstances is stylized in jazz via elegant improvisation. Flowing through the pressure of the (chord) changes, jazz bands create dynamic structures of rhythmic power that go by the name of “Swing…” an inimitable mix of “rhythm, tempo, and syncopation, all in the spirit of unrepressible improvisation to achieve, if not grace, at least a tentative equilibrium under the pressure of all tempos and unforeseeable but not unanticipated disjunctures.” Since jazz is “geared to the syntax of the drummer,” Murray clarifies that “it is a mistake for the uninitiated listener to approach blues music with the assumption that rhythm is only incidental to the melody.”

Keep in mind Murray’s emphasis on rhythm’s role in stylizing CONTROL not abandon – like a riff, repeating a primal warning – while listening to Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Richard Wagner and his infinite melodies rising and spiraling out of the  “complete degeneration of the sense of rhythm.”

Friedrich Nietzsche was not only a 19th-century psychologist-philosopher whose nose for declining life led him far beyond the academy. He was also a serious amateur musician and composer who averred that “without music life would be an error” and who testified that “music liberates the spirit” and “gives wing to thought.”

Nietzsche initially loved Wagner, deeply, but in time he heard at the heart of Wagner’s “infinite melody,” the swirling, surging, relentlessly striving ocean of color that agitated weary German nerves in the latter half of the 19th c., “chaos in place of rhythm.” Wagner’s music was an act that counterfeited great passions, “an imitation of the high tide of the soul” that aimed to excite spiritually exhausted audiences. Watching Germans cede CONTROL and abandon their self-possession to an infinite melody, Nietzsche declared Wagner “a danger.”

Rhythm provides measure. CONTROL not disintegration is a foundation of Swing. Following Wagner, however, “one walks into the sea, gradually loses one’s secure footing, and finally surrenders oneself to the elements without reservation: one must swim.”

Nietzsche loved Bizet’s Carmen, but not only because he could troll German readers by celebrating a Frenchman. Nietzsche loved Carmen because the music dances “lightly, supplely… ‘What is good is light; what is divine moves on tender feet.’”

 

The Flute, the Lyre and the Beat

In Book III of Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his young interlocutors decide to permit the guitar’s ancient ancestors, the “lyre and cither,” in their ideal republic, but to banish “the flute.” Socrates justifies the purge by appealing to a traditional precedent, “It’s nothing new we’re doing… in choosing Apollo and Apollo’s instruments ahead of Marsyas and his instruments.” It was an old story already in Socrates’ time: once, Apollo the god and Marsyas the satyr fought a musical battle, with Apollo on lyre and Marsyas on flute. Apollo won.

Socrates doesn’t say what was at stake in the battle, but Plutarch offers a gloss in his “Life of Alcibiades,” the uber-talented statesman and general and Socrates’ sometime-student, “When he came to study, (Alcibiades) was fairly obedient to most of his teachers, but refused to learn the flute, which he regarded as an ignoble accomplishment and quite unsuitable for a free citizen.”

Why did Alcibiades refuse to play the flute?

He argued that… the lyre accompanies… the words or the song of its performer, but the flute seals and barricades his mouth and deprives him both of voice and speech. ‘Leave the flute to the sons of Thebes,’ Alcibiades concluded, ‘for they have no idea of conversation. We Athenians, as our fathers say, have… Apollo for our patron.’

Plutarch’s Alcibiades preferred Apollo’s lyre for the same reason that Socrates and his young friends allowed the instrument into their imagined republic. The lyre, like the cither, is a string instrument, not a wind instrument. You play with your hands, not your mouth. And with musicians free to speak, or sing, Socrates accordingly was free to give the lyrics and, as such, the logos the leading role in the music played in his ideal city:

We’ll see which are the rhythms of an orderly… life, and when we have seen them, we’ll compel the foot and the tune to follow the speech of such a man, rather than the speech following the foot and the tune.

Albert Murray was deeply interested in the relationship between instrumental music and speech, and he shared the concern for shaping citizens’ capacity for self-control. His emphasis on heroic spiritedness, however, compelled Murray to overturn Plato’s order.

Murray began by counter-stating the common fallacy that blues music is sad music because blues lyrics so often include litanies of troubles and woes, “Definitions of blues music in most standard American dictionaries confuse it with the blues as such. They… leave the impression that what it represents is the expression of sadness.” Dictionary definitions focus on the lyrics, but “the words… are only a part of the statement” whose function is “to state the facts of life.” Once the facts of life are stated and accepted, however, the counter-stating stomp can begin:

What blues instrumentation in fact does, often in direct contrast to the words, is define the nature of the response to the blues situation at hand, whatever the source. Accordingly, more often than not, even as the words of the lyrics recount a tale of woe, the instrumentation may mock, shout defiance, or voice resolution and determination.

And in the highly distilled, rhythmic propulsion of Count Basie’s “classic Kansas City-style shout, stomp, shuffle and jump, the very beat of the music actually belies or in effect even denies the words.”

Control, not abandon, is one pillar of jazz. Resilient joy is another. Deep joy, for a spirited, heroic resilience deeper than words powers the music.

In entrusting music with the task of stylizing spiritedness, Murray wasn’t alone. Nietzsche did the same.

 

Stylizing Spiritedness

Friedrich Nietzsche deeply critiqued the leveling energy of modernity. He saw resentment as the fundamental power animating the modern democratic movement and judged the desire for comfortable self-preservation, the effectual spring of modernity, to be a sign of decline. Nietzsche responded by using music to open a channel to spirited depths buried beneath the dominant zeitgeist of our time.

In Nietzsche’s teaching, music provides a source of energy for noble souls who embrace suffering and danger with life-affirming strength. Nietzsche’s musical loves changed over the course of his career but the use of music for the sake of life remained constant, as did his ear for overflowing souls and music that embraces “every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life…” Everything, again! From the top!

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (originally subtitled “Out of the Spirit of Music”), celebrated Wagner’s Dionysian compositions as a source for conjuring a life-affirming philosophy of the future. The mature Nietzsche, however, held Wagner’s infinite melodies and melting audiences in contempt, celebrating instead Carmen’s rhythm and a “pessimism of strength” that opposes the Enlightenment failure to acknowledge, let alone embrace, that risk and suffering are essential for enhancing life, “Modern men, very tender, very easily hurt, and offering as well as receiving consideration a hundredfold, really have the conceit that this tender humanity… represents positive progress.”

Albert Murray wasn’t troubled by modernity per se, but he believed that a potent brew of Marxist political thought and Freudian psychoanalysis, often mediated by the social sciences and literature written under their influence, augmented the inclination to play the victim in America. He likewise wrote that the aspiration to create a society free from “ambivalence, complexity and strife” diminishes the capacity for heroic action.

Like Nietzsche before him, Murray turned to music to articulate a more heroic vision of life. Despite their different evaluations of modernity, Nietzsche and Murray are linked by their use of musical tools to resist enfeebling tendencies produced by, or within, the modern project. Murray diverged from Nietzsche in his aspiration to cultivate heroic action within liberal democracy.

Despite their different evaluations of modernity, Nietzsche and Murray are linked by their use of musical tools to resist enfeebling tendencies produced by, or within, the modern project. Murray diverged from Nietzsche in his aspiration to cultivate heroic action within liberal democracy.

Murray was a self-declared FDR Democrat and a proud American who knew that Black Americans made a decisive contribution to American culture. He didn’t consider modernity to be sick or decadent, and he championed the ideals of American democracy as articulated in, “the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.” 

Still, Murray contrasted the ways in which the hero and the modern “social-science oriented intellectual” respond to adversity: 

The outlying regions, the sinister circumstances beyond statistics, cooperate with the hero by virtue of the very fact of and nature of their existence. They help beget real-life and storybook heroes alike, not only by generating the necessity for heroism in the first place but by contesting its development at every stage and by furnishing the occasion for its fulfillment. Indeed, since in the final analysis, the greatness of the hero can be measured only in scale with the mischief, malaise, or menace he can dispatch, the degree of cooperation is always equal to the amount of antagonism.

The hero not only accepts, he or she welcomes the “sinister circumstances.” After all

complicated diseases… bring out the best doctors and the best in doctors. Without exasperating legal snarls there are only ordinary inexperienced lawyers, however promising… And so it goes… What brings out the best also shows up the worst, a procedure as indispensable as it is paradoxical.

Murray’s fear was that Americans were losing the capacity to accept that risk, pain and suffering are integral to life. In contrast to the hero’s embrace of “antagonistic cooperation,” the basic assumption of the “social science-oriented intellectual” is that 

life can be free of ambivalence, complexity and strife. He proceeds as if there were actually environments antiseptically free from folly… welfare states, as it were, moderately taxed but well budgeted against social problems and therefore immune to personal conflicts.

That passage was originally published in 1973. How would Murray respond to the present-day proliferation of “microaggressions,” “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”? 

Let’s imagine visiting the Jazz Master in his Harlem apartment. After an introductory discussion exploring heroism in American culture, Murray offers you single-malt scotch served in crystal-glass chalices specially cut with the names of his books. He hands you whisky in a glass etched Good Morning Blues. “Safe spaces? The Hero and the Blues and Stomping the Blues should be taught in American schools.” Then, looking you over with a sly sparkle in his eye, he smiles, “Work it into your consciousness: when the modes of music change, the ways of the state change with them.”

 

A Monumental Interpretation 

One can criticize Murray’s interpretation of jazz from a variety of angles. For instance, his interpretation of blues-idiom music is a secular interpretation. In Stomping the Blues, Murray explicitly opposes the earthy ritual function of blues and jazz to the other-worldly focus of the church. How does he account for the musical mysticism of John Coltrane, one of the great jazz musicians of the latter half of the 20th c. whose classic 1965 album, A Love Supreme, is explicitly religious?  Where Murray saw chaos, Coltrane saw creation, “I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things that he knows of and senses in the universe.” 

Murray’s response was to treat anomalies in perfunctory fashion and to squeeze the remainder into the contours of his strong theory, “John Coltrane… is essentially a post-Charlie Parker instrumental extension of the traditional hard-driving blues shouter.” True enough, but far from the whole story. 

Do anomalies diminish the power of Murray’s interpretation of jazz? Only if we expect Murray’s interpretation to be universally applicable, which is to say, scientific. But interpretation is not a science, and a limited horizon is inherent to any monumental interpretation of history. What’s more, jazz invites this monumental interpretation. Reflect upon the pain that preceded the music and the names of the legends involved in its making:  King Oliver, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis “Pops” Armstrong, Lester “Prez” Young, and so on. As the godmother of American moxie, Zora Neale Hurston, clarified almost a century ago, oppression “intensified (the) inner life” of some Black Americans “instead of destroying it.”

But even if we acknowledge the depth and spirited power of his interpretation, Albert Murray’s vision is a minority view today. The post-colonial, progressive left and the racist, identitarian right reject the Omni-American idea and ideal.  There are no human depths for them, just structures of dominance and oppression. Race is real, not ‘so-called.’ What, in this context, are the prospects for Murray’s thought? 

The answer depends on two related questions. First, are Americans open to exploring music for wisdom? If so, not only Murray, but a rich tradition waits to aid in the quest. 

Secondly, are Americans ready to believe that a joyous and heroic sense of life that originally grew out of Black American culture potentially belongs to every citizen as their national birthright? 

If these questions are answered in the affirmative, then we can imagine little Al’s boyhood mission fulfilled in Albert Murray’s Omni-American vision of swinging through the changes, even when they break your heart, noble souls stomping the blues with grace, gratitude, and conviction saying Yes, to life.

A dynamic tension in Murray’s novels often missed by readers is found in Murray’s psychological finesse.

A burden comes with being asked to define the contribution to American life of someone like Albert Murray. By “someone like” Murray, I mean the fact of his not being quite a household name—great though he was—which only adds to the pressure. In the face of Murray’s relative obscurity, those who know and love his work care that much more fiercely about how that work is characterized; we dream of a day when our hero’s writing is more widely known (or else we don’t, since his work would then no longer be our special province), a time when there will be room for that writing to be the subject of argument, dissent, interpretation, and counterinterpretation. But until that day comes, any appreciation had better get it right, or “right”—or some of us, count on it, will be pissed.

The safer thing, then, is to describe what Murray’s work means for oneself—nobody can argue with that, can they?—which presents its own challenge. When a body of work has become so important to you that it is effectively part of you, can it be separated long enough to get a good look? Well, let’s give this thing a try.

Some of us Black folks, struggling to make sense of our place in the grand American experiment, have verged on despair because, while the country we call home seems to think so little of us, we feel unable to embrace a continent (Africa) whose ways have been made foreign to us. For these folks, paradoxically, the work of Albert Murray provides a shot of optimism through its very lack of the sentimental. A clear-eyed look at the facts, Murray’s work suggests to me, reveals a history of heroism in the Black American story (our very survival until now attests to that), which in turn constitutes a tradition upon which we have the right, the duty, to stand—and which we are challenged to continue. That is how I interpret the term “ancestral imperative,” a phrase Murray used often: the duty we owe to the ancestors who got us this far.

How do we continue that tradition? We struggle, we fight dragons—another favorite phrase of Murray’s—in our own way.

That is the stuff of story, and story, whose refinement is literature, is the stuff of humankind: stories and art generally are the stylization of experience, as Murray was wont to put it. The conflict over which we triumph provides the “antagonistic cooperation” that enables us—or the versions of ourselves we place in our stories—to be heroes.

That is the stuff of story, and story, whose refinement is literature, is the stuff of humankind: stories and art generally are the stylization of experience, as Murray was wont to put it. The conflict over which we triumph provides the “antagonistic cooperation” that enables us—or the versions of ourselves we place in our stories—to be heroes.

Murray’s most celebrated books, including The Omni-Americans (1970), The Hero and the Blues (1973), and Stomping the Blues (1976), are celebrations of these ideas. (The blues, Murray once wrote, is “music for good times, earned in adversity.”)

One might expect, then, that triumph over adversity would be central in Murray’s own storytelling, i.e., in his quartet of novels, Train Whistle Guitar(1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991), The Seven League Boots (1995), and The Magic Keys (2005). But what I have elsewhere termed “the great irony of Albert Murray’s career” is that for Murray’s alter-ego, the southern-raised Scooter, who over the course of the four books grows to manhood, travels with a famous jazz band, romances a famous beautiful woman before finding his true love, and embarks on a course of higher education, the path seemingly could not be easier.

There is widespread agreement on this point. “Whatever Scooter touches turns to praise,” in the words of one critic; Murray’s estranged friend and disciple Stanley Crouch referred to “the legions of the Scooter-awed” in Murray’s novels, and even Charles Johnson’s tribute to Murray in the New York Times Book Review pointed out that things simply come too easily to Scooter. Such ease would not only appear to go against everything that Murray himself holds to be vital for the success of literature: it would seem to violate a universally agreed-upon tenet of all storytelling, which is the necessity for conflict.

On the surface, it is hard to disagree with those assessments. To give just two examples of Scooter’s Midas touch: at the end of The Spyglass Tree, he is presented with the gift of an acoustic bass, an instrument he has never before played, and by the start of The Seven League Boots, he has mastered it sufficiently to occupy a position in the world of music that other musicians might well fail to attain after a lifetime of practice; then there is that famous beautiful woman, Jewel Templeton, who speaks to Scooter—until that moment a total stranger to her—while she is stopped at a light in her Rolls-Royce and he is waiting for a taxi. Small wonder that, as some complain, Scooter does not overcome obstacles; said obstacles seem to flee at the very sight of him.

And yet, something tells me there is more to all of this luck than has been acknowledged. For a man as fiercely intelligent as Murray, who time and again pointed to the importance of triumphing over adversity in the hero’s journey, it is highly unlikely that he was blind to the need for conflict in his own novels. My question, then, is whether we have been looking for that conflict in the wrong places, whether, perhaps, it has been present all along, wearing a disguise while staring us in the face.

Consider what Murray and Scooter have in common. Both grew up in Alabama in the early years of the twentieth century. In a time and place notoriously unkind to Black folks, both were raised by loving parents who, it was eventually revealed, were not their biological mother and father. Murray and Scooter were notably intelligent, and thus, both had placed upon them the hopes, expectations, and encouragement of their communities.

Therein, I maintain, lay Murray’s—and Scooter’s—very own dragons.

In her 1992 volume Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison argued that our study of American literature would be a good deal richer if we were to pay attention to the subtle and not-so-subtle signs, in fiction narratives, of authors’ awareness of the Black presence in their midst; writers creating the literature of a nation founded on the ideal of freedom, Morrison argued, surely needed something or someone to define that freedom against, a role that Blacks filled nicely. I would propose a similar approach with regard to Murray’s novels. That is, I suggest that the experience of reading Murray’s novels might be more rewarding if we pay attention to what is, as with all literature worthy of the name, between and outside the lines—in this case, as it relates to the burden of expectation.

I suggest that the experience of reading Murray’s novels might be more rewarding if we pay attention to what is, as with all literature worthy of the name, between and outside the lines—in this case, as it relates to the burden of expectation.

First, though, let us take a look at some of the lines themselves. Train Whistle Guitar is generally held to be the novel in the quartet that is least weighed down by all the praise for the main character, and some adult characters, such as the man who marries Scooter’s aunt, even give Scooter the side-eye. 

More representative, though, are the lines spoken about the very young Scooter, in his presence, by Sawmill Turner, a comparatively well-off man in the community. After giving our hero an impromptu history lesson, Sawmill announces, “This boy is worth more than one hundred shares of gilt-edged preferred, and the good part about it is we all going to be drawing down interest on him.” After Turner has given the boy a five-dollar bill and promised to keep him supplied with pens and paper as long as he stays in school, Scooter—as first-person narrator—tells us, “All I could do was say thank you, and I said I would always do my best.” That may be all the poor boy can do, but it apparently does not begin to satisfy the adults’ need to lavish compliments on him: 

All Mama could do was wipe her eyes, and all Papa could do was look at the floor and shake his head and smile. But Uncle Jerome was on his feet again . . . and I knew he was going to take over where Sawmill Turner had left off and preach a whole sermon with me in it that night. And so did everybody else, and they were looking at me as if I really had become the Lamb or something.

All I could do . . . as if . . . or something: Scooter’s language suggests an awareness of both the adults’ excessiveness in heaping glory on him and his own inability to respond adequately.

The older Scooter gets, the less he can escape the chorus of approval. One of the male rites of passage he undergoes as a college student in The Spyglass Tree is a visit to a prostitute; here, a reader might think, is one situation in which Scooter can be free of all the good-boy talk, but the miracle is that he can perform sexually in the face of this woman’s auntlike, downright oppressive faith in him:

You a nice boy . . . I mean sure enough nice like you been brought up to be. Don’t take much to tell when it come to something like that. . . . you take care of yourself and hit them books . . .

Overcoming danger and any obstacles to success in life, for this young Black man coming of age in the Jim Crow South of the early twentieth century, would seem to be as nothing—and I am being only partly facetious—compared with being the object of all of this praise, faith, and expectation, which may be why Murray solves some of the external conflicts offscreen, as it were. The challenges for even the most strong-minded individual in Scooter’s position would almost certainly involve not external troubles but twin fears, having to do not with self-doubt over his color—he has been raised too well for that—but with what he will accomplish: What am I to do with all of this promise? And What if I disappoint them all? (Add to those thoughts two more: How do I bear up under all this damn praise? And why won’t these people shut the hell up until I actually do something?)

A suggestion that Scooter does indeed feel the burden, that his drama and conflict are as much internal as external, comes in The Seven League Boots, which finds him playing bass in a famous jazz band led by the fictional Bossman and romancing Jewel Templeton. One passage has Jewel, a white woman, talking about all that Scooter has exposed her to culturally and socially, and Scooter responding to us, if not to her:

So whenever she would say what she would say again and again about what she was not only learning but also coming to terms with because you were there, all you had to do was turn your head as if from well-meaning but gross exaggeration and then change the subject back to the point at which her enthusiasm had interrupted you. 

Note the use of the second-person narrative, which allows the protagonist to view the situation objectively long enough to deal with it. That objectivity is the way of both the bluesman and the storybook hero that Murray lays out in The Hero and the Blues. Note, too, what happens not between the lines in this case but between the words. “[A]ll you had to do was turn your head,” Scooter tells us, and while he does not describe what “your” face—unseen by Jewel—is doing in that moment, one might imagine an expression of exasperation, a look that says, Will you just let me say what I’m trying to say? The boy from Train Whistle Guitar who knows only to say “thank you” has grown into the young man of The Seven League Boots who has developed a means of wading through the swamp of positivity long enough to make his point. His reticence and stoicism, as he does so, are in keeping with the view espoused by Murray that storybook heroes and actual people should fight dragons but not complain about their existence. In place of complaint, in this instance, comes substitution. This is a key element for how I propose reading Murray’s fiction: interpreting the stoic Murray/Scooter’s frequent use of the “you” as, well, you. What might your own inner struggles be in these situations? Likely, they are Scooter’s too.

And Scooter must, and does, struggle. “Ancestral imperative,” it turns out, is more than a nice-sounding phrase; it represents weight to be carried. Scooter’s way of signaling that weight involves—again—substitution. In The Seven League Boots, Scooter recalls his college roommate saying about the ancestral imperative (italics Murray’s), “The question is which ancestors and what priority of which imperatives.” What is important here is that Scooter does not, perhaps cannot, complain of this confusion himself; it must be done through someone else. Even as Scooter’s easy triumphs only demonstrate his abilities, and those abilities only increase the pressure on him to choose his steps carefully, his added challenge is to avoid appearing, himself, to feel that pressure—to be stoic, in accordance with his own code.

As for the pressure itself, the fears that might be expressed as What am I to do with all of this promise? and what if I disappoint them all? can be seen in the passage from The Seven League Boots in which Scooter resolves to leave the Bossman’s jazz band, to see if he can make it on his own as a musician before going to graduate school (the territory of The Magic Keys). To the ordinary stress of making one’s way in the world and choosing a career path is added the pressure of doing so on behalf of one’s elders and ancestors, for whom the Bossman, in this instance, is a stand-in. 

Here we see Scooter confronting his own version of the dragon. An elder has laid out a path for him—an “ancestral imperative”—but Scooter, as the hero of his own story, must choose his own path. He feels the weight of this choice.

Here we see Scooter confronting his own version of the dragon. An elder has laid out a path for him—an “ancestral imperative”—but Scooter, as the hero of his own story, must choose his own path. He feels the weight of this choice.

Sitting in a diner, Scooter first tells one of the bandmembers, Joe States, about his decision to leave the Bossman. “Then [Joe] said, Damn, man, you sure got some heavy stuff to lay on the bossman this morning. And I said, Don’t I know it though. I said, Man, do I know it.” Two things are noteworthy here: first, that the “heavy stuff” is laid on the Bossman, which suggests but also masks the burden on Scooter; second, that it is Joe States, not Scooter—in keeping with Scooter’s stoicism—who first acknowledges this burden.

One could call this a “good problem,” and one would not be wrong, but good problems can still be problems, and Scooter’s are paradoxically amplified by his very gifts. Beneath every compliment and bit of encouragement he has ever received is the unspoken assertion that the glory of an oppressed people rests with him, and if anything in these novels matches his abilities, it is the corresponding and frightful responsibility he bears for not screwing it all up.

Murray’s insight into American society being a blend of regional and cultural archetypes was profoundly eye-opening.

Greg Thomas:

Thanks for joining us from Paris, Thomas. Let’s go back to the beginning. When did you first read the work of Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison?

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Hard to pinpoint an exact moment with Murray. With Ellison, I remember very well that I had spent my junior year summer abroad in France, and was taking the train between a small town called Tours and Paris and talking to another student from the University of Chicago who was asking me if I had read Invisible Man, and I said, “No.” And he said, “Oh man, that’s crazy. You have to read it like tomorrow. It’s the most incredible novel I’ve ever read.” People actually very rarely talk that way, so I immediately had to read it – and I was pretty astonished.

I would compare the feeling to when I encountered Moby Dick; I was expecting something to be from another time, and it felt completely fresh in a way that the best art does. It felt like the language was alive. And I also was astonished by the boldness of Ellison’s vision; certain images just changed the way that I think about race. And I came to think about my own place in society and society at large, the image of the narrator at Liberty Paints realizing that to get the whitest shade of paint, they drop a drop of pitch black paint into it and stir it. And that metaphor for the mongrel nature of American society, that it’s the mixture that makes it what it is, and [that] you actually can’t erase the blackness – and you wouldn’t want to. So that really just astonished me.

That was before I was even consciously trying to be a writer. Then later, when I was in graduate school at NYU, around 2006, I began reading Stanley Crouch. I became friends with him, and through knowing Crouch, I found Murray. I got The Omni-Americans at some point, and then I said, “Wait a minute.”  Then I did my research on their relationship, and I thought, Invisible Man is coming out of ideas that Ellison had been talking about with Murray that they were developing as students at Tuskegee. It’s difficult to know if Invisible Man is a singular achievement — with no shade to Ellison — or if it’s more of a culture they were collectively creating, which was extraordinary. So that’s a long way of saying that I encountered Invisible Man first, and through that, I got my foot and my mind into this kind of larger ecosystem that Murray’s very much a part of.

I did my research on their relationship, and I thought, Invisible Man is coming out of ideas that Ellison had been talking about with Murray that they were developing as students at Tuskegee. It’s difficult to know if Invisible Man is a singular achievement — with no shade to Ellison — or if it’s more of a culture they were collectively creating, which was extraordinary. 

Greg Thomas:

And what was your first impression of Murray when you read him?

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

The more important figure. And that’s a very difficult thing to say because, for me, Ellison is the preeminent American novelist. But the way that the ideas and the thinking were distilled and the uniqueness of the essays, the uniqueness of the way that Murray went about thinking publicly, and the dignity with which he did this work without worrying about whose shadow might be cast over him, who might be getting more attention… Starting in his fifties to do this kind of work and then really doing it better than just about anybody. And just being comfortable in his own critical mode.

I started to think The Omni-Americans might be the most extraordinary nonfiction book I’d ever read. 

The idea that American society is based on these regionalisms, these regional characters: the Yankee, the backwoodsman, the Native American, and the African, or more specifically what they both called, insisted on calling, the American Negro. This figure was profoundly, distinctly, quintessentially American and was American precisely because this figure combined within herself all of the fundamental archetypes of American culture, of American democracy. That was such a profound insight to me. And then I went back and, as an adult, read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. This is an insight that he had in the 1830s. This is different, this is a new society. These are new people. This culture inextricably links these archetypes; these peoples from the Old World combined in the New World with the Native Americans and created something new. And Murray explained that to me more clearly than anybody else I’d ever encountered, including James Baldwin.

Greg Thomas:

Wow. Your latest book, Self-Portrait in Black and White, has an epigraph from Ellison’s classic Invisible Man, which you’ve already mentioned. Later in the work, you said that the tradition your “father belonged to was the open omni-faceted one of Albert Murray.” Ellison and Murray’s oeuvre and the work of our mutual friend, Stanley Crouch, emphasized culture over what Stanley called a decoy of race. Did their emphasis on culture over race lay a foundation for your current retirement from race?

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Culture ‒ and I would take that back, again, to regional cultures ‒ is a more profound way of thinking of oneself. We think of ourselves through the specificity of where we come from, what community shaped us, what time and place we are moving through the world in. That that was more important than race, yes, Ellison articulated that for me, but this is something my father modeled for me, and I intuited through my father’s presence in my life before I consciously encountered it on the page. So my father, like Ellison, is from the Southwest; he’s from Texas, from East Texas. He was born in Longview and grew up in Galveston, this little island, but he considers himself from the Southwest of the United States. And Ellison was very deliberate in how he presented himself as being from Oklahoma, and that’s different from being from Mississippi or just being monolithically Black.

And so my father was Black. He explained to me that he was socially constructed as Black in American society, but that for him, he was regionally Southwestern and that, furthermore, biologically, race is not a meaningful category. These were ways of talking and thinking that were present in my house. When I encountered that quote of Ellison’s that I used in my book, “Blood and skin do not think,” that was just such a pithy way of saying what I think my father was always telling me, that you are who you are. You come from a place, your pigment, the way that people racialize you within the society that’s based on the collision of Africa and Europe through slavery, that will matter in your life, but that’s not who you are. You can’t allow that to be, and you don’t think through your epidermis. That’s not the measure of you, or anyone else, for that matter, no matter what anybody else tries to insist.

So I felt that my father is not a writer, he’s an intellectual, and he was more of a Socratic intellectual in that it was all ‒ he’s still with us, thankfully ‒ it was all through the speaking. He didn’t leave any writing, but I felt that he was very much of a way of being, I guess you would call it, Negro in American society in the 20th century, that was very much… it was in harmony with how these other men were Negroes in American society in the 20th century.

Greg Thomas: 

Finally, do you think the power of culture can adequately fight against the various forms of bigotry, of which antisemitism and racism are examples? If so, why? If not, why not?

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

Culture, cultural exchange, cultural understanding, and interest in our own and other cultures, is the only way we’ll transcend some of these divisions. I think that I’ve devoted quite a lot of my career to trying to push back against the idea that what we call race is scientifically meaningful, valid, or, even as a social construct, the right way to go about thinking of ourselves and each other. And that using culture to understand ourselves and each other is a more sure-footed way of doing it. What is a culture that unites people who are designated Jews, or what is a culture that unites people who are designated Black in America – as opposed to designated Black in France or other parts of the world – and are there some cultural aspects that you stretch back to Africa that unite the Black diaspora, wherever it may be found?

I’ve devoted quite a lot of my career to trying to push back against the idea that what we call race is scientifically meaningful, valid, or, even as a social construct, the right way to go about thinking of ourselves and each other. 

Those are interesting questions, and it has nothing to do with blood and skin, but they might have to do with traditions that are meaningful to hold onto and to understand and not to police in a way that I think we’re encouraged to talk about culture nowadays, which is to say that some people own some traditions and other people don’t, so some people have to grant permission, and if you have privilege in this matrix in society, then you can never use this culture. 

Culture is a complicated and potentially dangerous way of sorting ourselves, but it offers more hope and promise than the racial dynamic we’re caught in. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that’s a fully satisfactory answer. But we should find good faith, honest, sincere ways of engaging with one another’s cultures. We should forget about terms like cultural appropriation and realize that most of what has happened in human history to make the kind of societies grow and progress the way that they have is a kind of cultural synthesis between peoples.

And so I think America at its best, why it’s such an inspiration — I live in France — why America has always been such an inspiration to Europeans, going back to Tocqueville, going back as far as the founding, is that America represents a genuinely new synthesis in the world. It created modernisms such as jazz, which I know you’re very interested in. This is cultural synthesis at its best, and I think that a common American culture we really believe in and build together would also help heal the so-called racial divisions that are tearing us apart.