LibGuides: The Life and Times of Albert Lee Murray: Published Works

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Albert Murray's Published Works

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (essays), Outerbridge & Dienstfrey (New York, NY), 1970, published as The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy, Vintage Book (New York, NY), 1983.

South to a Very Old Place, McGraw (New York, NY), 1972.

The Hero and the Blues, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1973.

Stomping the Blues, McGraw (New York, NY), 1976.

(With Count Basie) Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie, Random House (New York, NY), 1985.

Reflections on Logic, Politics, and Reality: A Challenge to the Sacred Consensus of Contemporary American Thinking, Braimanna Publishers (Riverdale, NY), 1989.

The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statements, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1996.

Conversations with Albert Murray, edited by Roberta S. Maguire, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1997.

(Editor, with John F. Callahan) Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2000.

From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2001.

NOVELS

Train Whistle Guitar, McGraw (New York, NY), 1974.

The Spyglass Tree, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1991.

The Seven League Boots, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1996.

The Magic Keys, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2005.

OTHER

Conjugations and Reiterations (poetry), Pantheon (New York, NY), 200

Source: Gayle Literary Source

Journal Articles Written by Albert Murray

copied

This is not an extensive list. Please consult the library's databases for more articles.

“The Blues as Dance Music.” Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1990): 67–72.
From the Briarpatch File.” Callaloo 24, no. 4 (2001): 1127–34.
“Regional Particulars and Universal Statement in Southern Writing.” Callaloo, no. 38 (1989): 3–6.
“The Vernacular Imperative: Duke Ellington’s Place in the National Pantheon.” Boundary 2 22, no. 2 (1995): 19–24.

Intellectual Traditions at Tuskegee

Source: Tuskegee University Archives
Please contact the University Archives with any questions regarding this document.
Email: archives@mytu.tuskegee.edu
Phone: 334-725-2383

Books Available at the Ford Motor Company Library

The omni-Americans; new perspectives on Black experience and American culture by Albert Murray
Call Number: E185 .M9 1970
ISBN: 0876900015
Publication Date: 1970-01-01
THE OMNI-AMERICANS is a book that takes its stand in direct opposition to much of the biographical, autobiographical, sociological, and fictional representations of U.S. Negro life that have emerged in the past decade - including such acclaimed works as Kenneth Clark's "Dark Ghetto", "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (the Moynihan Report)", and William Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner". With verve, wit, and keen intelligence Murray argues that U.S. negroes are neither creatures of a deficient and debilitating culture (hapless victims of "cultural deprivation") nor uprooted Africans cruelly denied their rightful heritage on the shores of "white America", but are in fact Americans - as American as the frontiersman - who not only are an essential part of the American cultural "Mainstream" but one of its foremost creators. It is as Americans of long standing and full stature, he maintains, that Negroes must claim and be accorded the social and economic rights they have been denied. From this perspective, he examines, in the last section of THE OMNI-AMERICANS, the current demand for courses and departments of black studies. Although in part a discussion of one of America's most disastrous social problems, this interrelated collection of essays is more than anything else a contribution to the understanding of American life and culture, and a document in the history of the country's national self-awareness.
Source and cover: amazon.com
South to a very old place by Albert Murray
Call Number: PS3563.U764 Z47 1995 (Located in the Washington Room)
ISBN: 0679601473
Publication Date: 1995-02-07
The highly acclaimed novelist and biographer Albert Murray tells his classic memoir of growing up in Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s in South to a Very Old Place. Intermingling remembrances of youth with engaging conversation, African-American folklore, and astute cultural criticism, it is at once an intimate personal journey and an incisive social history, informed by “the poet’s language, the novelist’s sensibility, the essayist’s clarity, the jazzman’s imagination, the gospel singer's depth of feeling” (The New Yorker).
“His perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor and its tenacious hold on the intellect. . . . [It] destroys some fashionable sociopolitical interpretations of growing up black.”—Toni Morrison, The New York Times Book Review
-This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Source: amazon.com
The Hero and the Blues by Albert Murray
Call Number: PS153.N5 M87 1995
ISBN: 0679762205
Publication Date: 1996-01-16
In this visionary book, Murray takes an audacious new look at black music and, in the process, succeeds in changing the way one reads literature. Murray's subject is the previously unacknowledged kinship between fiction and the blues. Both, he argues, are virtuoso performances that impart information, wisdom, and moral guidance to their audiences; both place a high value on improvisation; and both fiction and the blues create a delicate balance between the holy and the obscene, essential human values and cosmic absurdity.
Encompassing artists from Ernest Hemingway to Duke Ellington, and from Thomas Mann to Richard Wright, The Hero and the Blues pays homage to a new black aesthetic.
Source: amazon.com
Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray
ISBN: 0070440875
Publication Date: 1974-01-01
Set in 1920s Gasoline Point, Alabama, a fictitious town based on author Albert Murray's hometown of Magazine Point, Train Whistle Guitar is a coming of age story of Scooter, a young black boy who with his friend Little Buddy, learns about life by attending school, hopping a train, wandering the woods, listening to grownups at garden fences and fireside circles, hiding underfoot at Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy's barbershop, perching in trees at night to watch dancing in the jook joint, and from Luzana Cholly, a gun-toting guitar player. In each of these settings, Murray not only captures the feel of African American kinship within a small town in the South, but the experience of children who are raised not just by their parents, but by an entire community. Regardless of blood relationships, all of Scooter's elders in Gasoline Point play the role of Auntee or Uncle. In his breathless, artless kid-voice, he talks about bootleggers, rednecks, scandals, war, baseball, love, trains, family and music, all in an impressionistic medley of stories that somehow end up forming a growing-up tale.
Source and cover: amazon.com
Stomping the blues by Albert Murray
Call Number: ML3561.B63 M9 (Located in the Washington Room)
ISBN: 0070440743
Publication Date: 1976-11-01
In this classic work of American music writing, renowned critic Albert Murray argues beautifully and authoritatively that “the blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance.”

In Stomping the Blues Murray explores its history, influences, development, and meaning as only he can. More than two hundred vintage photographs capture the ambiance Murray evokes in lyrical prose. Only the sounds are missing from this lyrical, sensual tribute to the blues.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Source and cover: amazon.com
Good morning blues : the autobiography of Count Basie by William "Count" Basie; Albert Murray
Call Number: ML422.B25 A3 1985B
ISBN: 0917657896
Publication Date: 1986-11-01
Count Basie was one of America’s pre-eminent and influential jazz pianists, bandleaders, and composers, known for such classics as “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” “Goin’ to Chicago Blues,” “Sent for You Yesterday and Here You Come Today,” and “One O’Clock Jump.” In Good Morning Blues, Basie recounts his life story to Albert Murray, from his childhood years playing ragtime with his own pickup band at dances and pig roasts, to his years in New York City in search of opportunity, to rollicking anecdotes of Basie’s encounters with Fats Waller, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Sammy Davis Jr., Quincy Jones, Billie Holliday, and Tony Bennett. In this classic of jazz autobiography that was ten years in the making, Albert Murray brings the voice of Count Basie to the printed page in what is both testimony and tribute to an incredibly rich life.
Source and cover: amazon.com
The spyglass tree by Albert Murray
Call Number: PS3563 .U764 S69 1992 (Located in the Washington Room)
ISBN: 0679730850
Publication Date: 1992-10-27
By “our premier writer about jazz and the blues . . . and a fictional tale spinner in the grand Southern tradition” (Washington Post Book World), The Spyglass Tree is a deeply affecting novel of elegant, lyrical reminiscence and profound sophistication about a young black man’s advent into the world of academia—an imaginary Alabama college—in the 1930s.
Admist the excitement of the world of ideas and adventures with new friends, Scooter sallies into “the territory of the blues,” where recollection becomes legend. Here he learns to deal with the vicissitudes of life—the complexities of family ties and camaraderie, his sexuality, pride of excellence in school, the darker realities of history and human passion—through confrontation and improvisation, and with style and courage.
“[The Spyglass Tree] strikes a perfect balance between the black folk tradition and Faulknerian rumination. . . . One reads this very fine novel for the glissando effect of its language, the vibrancy of its characters and the unabashed pleasure Mr. Murray takes in nostalgia for its own sake . . . with level-headed clarity and honesty.”—The New York Times Book Review
Source: amazon.com
The blue devils of Nada : a contemporary American approach to aesthetic statement by Albert Murray
Call Number: NX512.3.A35 M87 1997
ISBN: 0679758593
Publication Date: 1997-06-24
To Albert Murray the blues is not about suffering but about transcendence through sheer style pinpointed in the work of such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Romare Bearden, Ernest Hemingway. Murray demolishes our stereotypes about art, race, and what it means to be human in an intelligent and whirlwind tour of American culture.

Murray gives readers the redefined essence of his lifetime meditation on the blues as this musical style informs American life. Here are incisive essays on writing, music, and art that go beyond the social-science fiction of Negrohood to describe in no uncertain terms what it means to be American.
Source: worldcat.org & amazon.com
The seven league boots : a novel by Albert Murray
Call Number: PS3563.U764 S48 1995
ISBN: 0679439862
Publication Date: 1996-01-23
The break-out novel by an unrecognized master--"a fictional tale spinner in the grand Southern tradition" (Washington Post Book World). Told from the point of view of a young Alabama college graduate in the 1920s, this brilliant novel recounts the exploits of a legendary jazz composer and his band on a tour that becomes a heroic journey "equivalent to the seven league strides of heroes in rocking chair story times."
Source: amazon.com
Conversations with Albert Murray by Roberta S. Maguire (Editor); Albert Murray
Call Number: PS3563.U764 Z464 1997
ISBN: 1578060079
Publication Date: 1997-11-01
As a cultural critic, biographer, essayist, and novelist, Albert Murray has had a wide-ranging and profound influence on American art in the decades since the Second World War. Artists as diverse as Walker Percy, Romare Bearden, and Wynton Marsalis have drawn from Murray and his ideas on jazz and the blues, modern consciousness, and the role of race in the American identity. His own works include The Hero and the Blues, Train Whistle Guitar, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as Told to Albert Murray, The Spyglass Tree, The Blue Devils of Nada, and The Seven League Boots.
Yet this is the first book devoted to Murray himself, and fittingly it is based on the kind of conversations that have proven indispensable to his friends in the arts. It brings together twenty interviews with Murray conducted over the last twenty-four years, beginning with an interview that took place shortly after his second book, South to a Very Old Place, was published, and ending with a previously unpublished interview with the editor. In these conversations Murray discusses those who influenced him - Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington - and tells how they helped him develop a philosophy of art based on the blues as well as a new archetype of the American hero, the blues hero.
The collection reveals a man who enjoys a good time and a good conversation and whose intellectual improvisations move over such subjects as his reminiscences about the South he grew up in, his insights about regional culture, and commentaries about the contemporary American scene. He is quick to laugh, to conspire, to correct misperceptions, to mimic the sounds a great jazz musician makes, or to recite lines from favorite poems or novels. Taken together, these interviews reveal Murray to be the composite American he describes in his first book, The Omni-Americans, which, when published in 1970, announced a new and important literary voice.
Source: amazon.com
Trading twelves: the selected letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray by Ralph Ellison; Albert Murray
Call Number: PS3555.L625 Z49 2000 (Located in the Washington Room)
ISBN: 0375503676
Publication Date: 2000-06-13
This absorbing collection of letters spans a decade in the lifelong friendship of two remarkable writers who engaged the subjects of literature, race, and identity with deep clarity and passion. The correspondence begins in 1950 when Ellison is living in New York City, hard at work on his enduring masterpiece, Invisible Man, and Murray is a professor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Mirroring a jam session in which two jazz musicians "trade twelves"—each improvising twelve bars of music around the same musical idea-their lively dialog centers upon their respective writing, the jazz they both love so well, on travel, family, the work literary contemporaries (including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway) and the challenge of racial inclusiveness that they wish to pose to America through their craft. Infused with warmth, humor, and great erudition, Trading Twelves offers a glimpse into literary history in the making—and into a powerful and enduring friendship.
Source: amazon.com
Albert Murray: Collected essays and memoirs by Albert Murray; Paul Devlin (Editor); Henry Gates (Editor)
Call Number: PS3563 .U764 A6 2016 (Located in the Washington Room)
ISBN: 9781598535037
Publication Date: 2016-10-18
In his 1970 classic The Omni-Americans, Albert Murray (1916–2013) took aim at protest writers and social scientists who accentuated the “pathology” of race in American life. Against narratives of marginalization and victimhood, Murray argued that black art and culture, particularly jazz and blues, stand at the very headwaters of the American mainstream, and that much of what is best in American art embodies the “blues-hero tradition”— a heritage of grace, wit, and inspired improvisation in the face of adversity. Murray went on to refine these ideas in The Blue Devils of Nada and From the Briarpatch File, and all three landmark collections of essays are gathered here for the first time, together with Murray’s memoir South to a Very Old Place, his brilliant lecture series The Hero and the Blues, his masterpiece of jazz criticism Stomping the Blues, and eight previously uncollected pieces.