The Life and Times of Albert Lee Murray: Biographical Information

Albert Murray (c. 1939). © The Albert Murray Trust.

Source: http://www.full-stop.net/2016/11/07/interviews/andrew-mitchell-davenport/ paul-devlin-condensed/
 

Albert L. Murray
Alma S. Freeman, Montgomery, Alabama
Source: http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/m-5994 Published:  November 19, 2008 | Last updated:  August 19, 2013

Escambia County native Albert Lee Murray (1916-2013) was a noted music, social, and literary critic who won international acclaim for his novels, short stories, essays, and poems. His writings include the "Scooter" series of semi-autobiographical novels, cultural analyses such as The Omni-Americans, and seminal works on the influence of jazz and the blues on American culture. Murray often explored and celebrated the richness that arises from the intersection of African American and American culture. His most noteworthy contribution to American writing, however, was creating a unique style using elements of black cultural traditions—the rhythms of black southern speech, folklore, cultural heroes, the blues, and jazz—that influenced him during his coming of age in Alabama.

Murray was born on May 12, 1916, in Nokomis, Escambia County, a small town on the Florida-Alabama border. Shortly after his birth, he was adopted by Hugh and Mattie Murray and moved with them to Magazine Point, a small community on the outskirts of Mobile. Murray's early life closely resembles that of Scooter, the hero of his novel Train Whistle Guitar, who is given to foster parents at birth by a young woman who remains active in his life as his aunt. Like Scooter, Murray, at age 11, accidentally discovered that Hugh and Mattie were not his biological parents.

Murray completed his early education at Mobile County Training School. An excellent student, he was awarded a scholarship to Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where he developed an interest in jazz music and in literature and writing. Also at Tuskegee, he became aware of Ralph Ellison, who was an upper classman during Murray's freshman year and who was to achieve fame as the author of the timeless American classic Invisible Man. Later, in New York, the two writers would form a lasting friendship.

Murray graduated from Tuskegee Institute in 1939 and attended graduate school at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. He then taught English and American literature and directed theater at Tuskegee. After the outbreak of World War II, Murray entered the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1943 and served until 1946. After the war, he transferred to the U.S. Air Force Reserve and returned to teach at Tuskegee. Also in 1946, Murray married Mozelle Menefee, with whom he had one daughter, Michelle. Murray earned a master's degree in literature from New York University in 1948 and spent summers studying in Paris at the Sorbonne. Recalled to active duty in the U.S. Air Force in 1951, Murray spent four years as the head of the ROTC program at Tuskegee, served on assignments in the United States and in Morocco, and retired from the Air Force with the rank of major in 1962. He then settled in New York and began his career as a full-time writer.

South to a Very Old PlaceMurray's first book, The Omni-Americans (1970), is a collection of essays that first appeared under the subtitle New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture but was later republished carrying the subtitle Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy. As both subtitles reveal, Murray's intent as a writer is to offer the reader a new appraisal of African American culture and its place in the American experience. Murray followed The Omni-Americans with his memoir, South to a Very Old Place (1971), which begins in New York and moves southward. Along the way, Murray weaves into his personal journey insights about the value of the southern black experience, in places such as Mobile and Tuskegee, to American life. These first two books define the overarching themes and set the tone for much of Murray's later work.

In his writing, Murray presents an authentic analysis of African American life as he has known and lived it. As he does so, he neither ignores nor apologizes for the negative elements in the community that cause people to define African Americans as social problems—elements such as the poverty and crime resulting from a long tradition of slavery, segregation, discrimination, and racism. But he does strongly challenge the negative, oversimplified images that both blacks and whites represent as the common experience of all African Americans. Murray insists on portraying and celebrating the positive, nurturing qualities of African American life and the complexity of the culture.

Throughout his writings, Murray recreates the varied and colorful styles of speech and storytelling found in African American communities; his language flows and sways with the rhythms and beats of the blues and jazz. He develops characters, modeled on people from his own Alabama childhood, who are positive role models and teachers for the young. And he examines the lives and the contributions of notable African Americans in literature, the arts, and music.

The celebration of African American culture also is a central theme of Murray's four novels, semi-autobiographical narratives that exhibit some parallels to Murray's own life. In the first novel in the series, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), the main character, Scooter, finds himself immersed in and creatively nurtured by the black folk culture of Gasoline Point, a small community near Mobile in the 1920s. In The Spyglass Tree (1991), set in a college in Alabama similar to Tuskegee Institute during the 1930s, Scooter is a serious student who reads extensively in the library and "studies" music at a local jazz club, where he acquires a bass fiddle from the club's star blues singer. In The Seven League Boots (1996), Scooter is a bass player with a touring jazz band; he visits Europe, plays in a small jazz club, and finally returns home. The Magic Keys (2005), the final novel in the cycle, follows Scooter to New York City, where he marries, attends graduate school, explores Manhattan and Harlem, and establishes friendships with black writers, artists, and musicians. At the end of the novel, he prepares to fulfill his own destiny as a writer.

Four of Murray's nonfiction books focus on fostering a greater appreciation of the blues and jazz as musical genres that inform American life and art: The Hero and the Blues (1973), Stomping the Blues (1976), and The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement (1996). Murray also cowrote a biographical work with jazz legend William "Count" Basie, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie (1985).

Murray enjoyed a distinguished career as writer, teacher, and lecturer at universities that include Colgate, Washington and Lee, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Berlin. The Houghton Library of Harvard University recently purchased Murray's papers. Murray was one of the original founders (with Wynton Marsalis) and a board member of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He also received numerous honors and awards for his stellar contributions to American letters, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the DuBois Medal from the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University.

Murray continued to work and live in New York City, where he died on August 18, 2013. 

Additional Resources
Baker, Barbara A., ed. Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010.

Carson, Warren. "Albert Murray: Literary Reconstruction of the Vernacular Community." African American Review 27 (Summer 1993): 287-95.

Murray, Albert, and Roberta S. Maguire. Conversations with Albert Murray. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

Albert Murray, Scholar Who Saw a Multicolored American Culture, Dies at 97

By MEL WATKINS AUG. 19, 2013

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/books/albert-murray-essayist-who-challenged-the-conventional-dies-at-97.html

Albert Murray in his home in Harlem in 1998. CreditSuzanne Mapes/Associated Press

Albert Murray, an essayist, critic and novelist who influenced the national discussion about race by challenging black separatism, insisting that the black experience was essential to American culture and inextricably tied to it, died on Sunday at his home in Harlem. He was 97.

Lewis P. Jones, a family spokesman and executor of Mr. Murray’s estate, confirmed the death.

Mr. Murray was one of the last surviving links to a period of flowering creativity and spreading ferment among the black intelligentsia in postwar America, when the growing force of the civil rights movement gave rise to new bodies of thought about black identity, black political power and the prospects for equality in a society with a history of racism.

As blacks fought in the streets for civil rights, black integrationists and black nationalists dueled in the academy and in books and essays. And Mr. Murray was in the middle of the debate, along with writers and artists including James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Romare Bearden and his good friend Ralph Ellison.

One of his boldest challenges was directed toward a new black nationalist movement that was gathering force in the late 1960s, drawing support from the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, and finding advocates on university faculties and among alienated young blacks who believed that they could never achieve true equality in the United States.

Mr. Murray insisted that integration was necessary, inescapable and the only path forward for the country. And to those — blacks and whites alike — who would have isolated “black culture” from the American mainstream, he answered that it couldn’t be done. To him the currents of the black experience — expressed in language and music and rooted in slavery — run through American culture, blending with European and American Indian traditions and helping to give it its very shape and sound.

With a freewheeling prose style influenced by jazz and the blues — Duke Ellington called him “the unsquarest man I know” — Mr. Murray challenged conventional assumptions about art, race and American identity in books like the essay collection “Stomping the Blues” and the memoir “South to a Very Old Place.” He gave further expression to those views in a series of autobiographical novels, starting with “Train Whistle Guitar” in 1974.

Mr. Murray established himself as a formidable social and literary figure in 1970 with his first book, a collection of essays titled “The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture.” The book constituted an attack on black separatism.

“The United States is not a nation of black and white people,” Mr. Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.” America, he maintained, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts,” was a “nation of multicolored people,” or Omni-Americans: “part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian — and part Negro.”

Fokelore and ‘Fakelore’

The book also challenged what Mr. Murray called the “social science fiction” pronouncements of writers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who he said had exaggerated racial and ethnic differences in postulating a pathology of black life. As Mr. Murray put it, they had simply countered “the folklore of white supremacy” with “the fakelore of black pathology.”

“The Omni-Americans,” the novelist Walker Percy wrote, “may be the most important book on black-white relations in the United States, indeed on American culture,” published in his generation. But it had fierce detractors. Writing in The New York Times, the black-studies scholar and author J. Saunders Redding called the essays contradictory, Mr. Murray’s theories “nonsense” and his “rhetoric” a “dense mixture of pseudo-scientific academic jargon, camp idiom and verbal play.”

For many years Mr. Murray and the novelist Ralph Ellison, who met in college, were close friends and literary kindred spirits. In “King of Cats,” a 1996 profile of Mr. Murray in The New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that the friendship between the two men “seemed a focal point of black literary culture.”

“Both men were militant integrationists, and they shared an almost messianic view of the importance of art,” Mr. Gates wrote. “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. Now they were also defying a new black vanguard, which regarded authentic black culture as separate from the rest of American culture — something that was created, and could be appreciated, in splendid isolation.”

Disliked the Term ‘Black’

Like Ralph Ellison, Mr. Murray proposed an inclusive theory of “the American Negro presence.” (He disdained the use of the term “black” and later spurned “African-American” — “I am not an African,” he said, “I am an American.”)

Mr. Murray contended that American identity “is best defined in terms of culture.” And for him, American culture was a “composite,” or “mulatto,” culture that owed much of its richness and diversity to blacks.

Yet Mr. Murray was not always sure that whites understood this shared legacy when they embraced black artists. He could be suspicious of whites, asking whether they, even in their applause, nonetheless continued to regard black culture “as so much exotica,” as Mr. Gates put it. Thus Mr. Murray asked whether the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Toni Morrison in 1993 was not “tainted with do-goodism,” and whether the poet Maya Angelou’s readings at President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural echoed a song-and-dance tradition in which blacks entertained whites.

In Mr. Murray’s view, the essential bond between American culture and what he called Negro culture is the shared embrace of a “blues aesthetic,” which he said permeated the works of black musicians, writers and artists and was being increasingly adopted by whites. To Mr. Murray, the blues were “the genuine legacy of slavery,” Laura Ciolkowski, a professor of literature now at Columbia University, wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 2002.

“For him,” she wrote, “blues music, with its demands for improvisation, resilience and creativity, is at the heart of American identity.”

It also expressed something universal, Mr. Murray said. “When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues,” he wrote, “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 André Malraux describes as la condition humaine.”

Albert Lee Murray was born on May 12, 1916, in Nokomis, Ala., to middle-class parents who soon gave him up for adoption to Hugh Murray, a laborer, and his wife, Matty.

Photo

Albert Murray, left, with his friend, the writer  Ralph Ellison,  in 1967.  Credit Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images

“It’s just like the prince left among the paupers,” said Mr. Murray, who learned of his adoption when he was about 11. The Murrays moved to Mobile, where Albert grew up in a neighborhood known as Magazine Point. In “Train Whistle Guitar,” his largely autobiographical first novel, he called it Gasoline Point.

An Alter Ego in Novels

Through the novel’s protagonist, Scooter, his fictional alter ego, Mr. Murray evoked an unharrowed childhood enriched by music, legends, jiving and jesting, and the fancy talk of pulpit orators and storefront storytellers.

After graduating from the Mobile County Training School, where he earned letters in three sports and was voted the best all-around student, Mr. Murray enrolled at what is now Tuskegee University, where he discovered literature and immersed himself in Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and Mann. He met Ralph Ellison, an upperclassman, as well as another student, Mozelle Menefee, who became his wife in 1941. She survives him, as does their daughter, Michéle Murray, who became a dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Mr. Murray received a bachelor of science degree in education in 1939 and began graduate study at the University of Michigan. But the following year, he returned to Tuskegee to teach literature and composition.

He enlisted in the military in 1943 and spent the last two years of World War II in the Army Air Corps. After the war, the Murrays moved to New York City, where he used the G.I. Bill to earn a master’s degree from New York University and he renewed his friendship with Ellison. In 1951, a year before Ellison published his classic work, “Invisible Man,” Mr. Murray rejoined the military, entering the Air Force.

He served in the military, peripatetically, for 11 years — teaching courses in geopolitics in the Air Force R.O.T.C. program at Tuskegee in the 1950s, taking assignments in North Africa and studying at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago and the University of Paris.

After retiring from the Air Force as a major in 1962, he returned to New York with his family and settled in an apartment in the Lenox Terrace complex in Harlem. He began writing essays for literary journals and articles for Life and The New Leader, some of which were included in “The Omni-Americans.”

He also became a familiar figure on campuses, holding visiting professorships at the University of Massachusetts, Barnard, Columbia, Emory, Colgate and other schools. And he resumed exploring the streets and nightclubs of Harlem with Ralph Ellison.

From 1970 to the mid-1990s, as if compensating for his slow start, Mr. Murray published nine books. His second, “South to a Very Old Place” (1971), recounted his return to his Southern homeland. The book later became part of the Modern Library. In “The Hero and the Blues” (1973), a collection of essays based on a series of lectures, Mr. Murray criticized naturalism and protest fiction, which he said subjugated individual actions to social circumstances.

The Joy in the Blues

In “Stomping the Blues” (1976), he argued that the essence of the blues was the tension between the woe expressed in its lyrics and the joy infusing its melodies. He saw the blues, and jazz, as an uplifting response to misery.

“The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people,” Mr. Murray said years later. “It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people.”

He next began a long collaboration with Count Basie on his autobiography, “Good Morning Blues,” which was published in 1985, a year after Basie’s death. Along with the writer Stanley Crouch and the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Mr. Murray was actively involved in the creation of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the institution’s first permanent jazz program.

In 1991 he returned to his fictional alter ego, Scooter, depicting his college years at Tuskegee in the novel “The Spyglass Tree.” Four years later, as he neared 80, Mr. Murray published two books: “The Seven League Boots,” the third volume of his Scooter cycle, and “The Blue Devils of Nada,” another essay collection. Still another collection, “From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity,” which explored in part the “existential implications of the blues,” was published in 2001.

Mr. Murray published the fourth and last novel in his Scooter cycle, “The Magic Keys,” in 2005. The book, which received tepid reviews (it “feels plotted rather than lived,” John Leland wrote in The Times), brings its narrator, whose real name is never learned, to graduate school in Manhattan, where he befriends a thinly disguised Ralph Ellison and Romare Bearden.

Mainstream recognition was slow to come for Mr. Murray. But by the mid-1990s, the critic Warren J. Carson had called him “African America’s undiscovered national treasure,” and in 1997 the National Book Critics Circle gave Mr. Murray its award for lifetime achievement. The next year he received the inaugural Harper Lee Award as Alabama’s most distinguished writer.

In 2000, Mr. Murray published “Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray,” which he edited with John F. Callahan. That same year he appeared as a commentator in Ken Burns’s multipart PBS documentary “Jazz.”

The critic Tony Scherman wrote of Mr. Murray in American Heritage, “His views add up to a cohesive, elegant whole, making him a rarity in today’s attenuated intellectual world: a system builder, a visionary in the grand manner.”

He could also write on a personal scale: his first book of poems, “Conjugations and Reiterations,” appeared in 2001. And he was candid in writing about advanced age.

“I’m doing more than ever,” he wrote in an Op-Ed essay in The Times in 1998, two years after undergoing spinal surgery, “but it’s harder now. I’m in constant pain. At home I use a four-pronged aluminum stick to get around. I need a stroller when I’m on the street. At receptions and in airports I need a wheelchair to get down the long aisles.

“But nothing hurts quite like the loss of old friends. There are ways to cope at the time they die. But weeks and months later you realize you can’t phone them and talk: Duke Ellington, Romare Bearden, Ralph Ellison, Alfred Kazin, Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Mitchell. It’s hard to believe they’re all gone.”

 

William McDonald and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 20, 2013, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Scholar Saw a Multicolored American Culture.