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Books by Albert Murray
South to a Very Old Place
/
Stomping the Blues /
Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison
and Albert Murray
From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and
American Identity /
Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie
Train Whistle Guitar: A Novel /
The Hero and the Blues /
Conversations with Albert Murray /
The Magic Keys
Seven League Boots /
The Spyglass Tree /
The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American
Approach to Aesthetic Statement
* * *
* *
Albert Murray on
Ralph Ellison & the Aesthetics of Writing
By
Kalamu ya Salaam
Popular
literature is about topical issues. Serious
literature is about ideas and mythology (i.e.,
explanations and beliefs that explain the how and
why of one's humanity). Pop ages poorly precisely
because it is about the here and now. Serious
writing is often not fully appreciated until years
after its appearance.
In the realm of
novels, most Black novelists have been relegated to
the realm of pop/topicality. Richard Wright and
James Baldwin are considered the apogee of the
issues approach, and resultantly often criticized
for being propagandists rather than pure (i.e.,
"serious") novelists. Toni Morrison has managed to
transcend the ghetto of topicality on the basis of
the reach of her craft, yet even she is sometimes
excluded from the ranks of the "great" novelists of
the western canon. The only Black writer to be
critically admired without reservation is Ralph
Ellison who published but one novel during his
lifetime, The Invisible Man, a book that the
"regulators of serious literature" considered the
zenith of Black fiction.
In 1999 two
major events are in the offing: the posthumous
publication of an unfinished novel by Ralph Ellison,
and the publication of correspondence between
Albert
Murray and Ralph Ellison
as edited by Murray. My bet
is that second book will be the one to read.
Although Murray
and Ellison were comrades in the struggle to elevate
the thinking and literature of Black folk, Murray is
the one who has made his mark as a critic, and as
such, Murray is the one who asks challenging
questions and poses imaginative paradigms for
understanding and addressing literature. As the book
of letters between he and Ellison reveals, we may
think of Ellison as the towering giant, but Murray
has all the elements of the mythical trickster who
is overlooked even as he is overcoming.
Albert Murray
was born in Nokomis, Alabama in 1916. He grew up in
Mobile and graduated from Tuskegee Institute, where
he subsequently taught literature. He is a retired
major in the U.S. Air Force. His books include
The Omni-Americans and
The Hero and the Blues,
collections of essays;
South to a Very Old Place,
an autobiography;
Stomping the Blues, a
history of the blues;
Train Whistle Guitar (a
National Book Award Nominee),
The Spyglass Tree
and
Seven League Boots, novels; and
Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie
(as told to Albert Murray).
This interview
was conducted by telephone.
* * *
* *
Kalamu ya
Salaam: You are both a writer and what is
popularly called "a public intellectual" but you
come from what the young folks would call "the old
skool..."
Albert
Murray: To young folks, everything is old. The
airplane, the atomic bomb, all of that is old to
them. Everything is old if you're just born, but
what you must remember is that everybody is born out
of date, behind the times. All these things are here
and they don't know about them, so their whole
mission in growing up is to come to terms with
things that are already here. What exists represents
reality, not just "oldness" and reality means
actuality, a response to your surroundings, your
environment, your setting. The whole business of
education is learning how to cope with the situation
that you were born into and to reduce that to saying
"that's old" is puzzling to me. What have eighteen
year old and twenty year old people done to modify
society, what have they done to modify the way
people live?
Kalamu ya
Salaam: They have in terms of popular
perception. For example, when you look at the award
programs, you see young musicians breaking all kinds
of records and you see them proclaimed as major
forces who have changed the face of music.
Albert
Murray: The popular perception is actually based
on promotional copy. They are just interested in
selling a product. They don't care whether the work
is good, bad, or indifferent; whether it is banal or
truly exciting. What they want to do is sell it.
They are not interested in accepting the challenge
of music; they just want to make something that you
can say is music and that will sell. If it sells
they give them a prize, a golden disc or a platinum
disc. But that's a hysterical approach.
If you are not
sufficiently historical in your perception of
actuality then your daily life is going to be
hysterical because you respond to everything that
comes up as if it's new and a lot of that stuff, all
you had to do was check up on it and you would have
known that it was going to happen.
Kalamu ya
Salaam: You have just completed a book of
correspondence with Ralph Ellison. This is a genre
which is different from fiction or essay in that
when the letters were written they were not intended
for a public audience but rather were meant as a
private conversation. What did it feel like as you
went back over those letters and began looking at
them from the standpoint of making a public
statement?
Albert
Murray: When Ralph passed, I was one of the
participants in the memorial ceremony at the Academy
of Arts and Letters. I decided to resurrect Ralph's
presence and give people some feeling for the person
who was my very close friend. I went through some of
the letters that I had and made a few excerpts.
There was a very good response to that. The Ellison
estate asked me how many of the letters I had saved
and wondered if they could get copies of them. The
actual letters themselves belong to me but I don't
have possession to the extent that I could publish
the material.
Kalamu ya
Salaam: The letters were your physical property
but not your intellectual property.
Albert
Murray: Right. The estate asked me to pull the
letters together to add to the
Ellison papers at the
Library of Congress. In pulling them together I
decided that they would make a fine little book. I
was going to call it "Works in Progress: Ellison on
Literary Craft and American Identity." I prepared
the manuscript and when Callahan, the executor, read
the manuscript he said this is a fine volume but I
miss your voice. What is it that you are saying that
is turning Ralph on like this? I said, man, I don't
remember that. I haven't seen those letters in forty
years. He said, I will check Ralph's papers to see
if he had kept your letters. He dug up the letters
and sent them to me. He said, I hope you agree that
this would make a more interesting and more complete
book if we made it an exchange of letters, and I
hope you will go along with that. I said, well, let
me read them. I don't know. When I read them I
thought I could go along with it. I then prepared
another manuscript.
The letters
reveal Ralph's personality like it is revealed no
where else because his letters to other people are
formal and straightforward, but our letters covered
a wide range of expression. Ralph talked about what
he was doing, for example, he talks about finishing
Invisible Man and what the problems were
finishing it. He talks about a manuscript of a novel
I had. We discussed literary things and social
things. We discussed other writers and critics. I
was thinking about a lot of those things. I wasn't
writing yet, though I was planning to write.
Kalamu ya
Salaam: Do you think there is a difference
between writing letters and talking on the phone in
terms of the final product . . .?
Albert
Murray: Not too much because we actually talked
to each other in our letters. That's what is
somewhat different about his letters to me and his
letters to other people. We talked through letters,
it wasn't just business.
I didn't really
know Ralph at Tuskegee. He was an upperclassman and
he was a guy I liked, the way he dressed. He was
very independent. Then I found out that he had read
a number of the books that I was planning to read.
When I checked the books out of the library I found
he had read them. When we got together in New York
during the war is when we became good friends.
Kalamu ya
Salaam: This may seem obvious, but people born
after say 1960 might not be aware of the library
signature cards in the books.
Albert
Murray: That's right. They had a card that you
signed and you could see who had read the book.
Often, I would see that Ralph was the only guy who
had read the book before me, other than sometimes
one of the faculty members who might have been doing
graduate work. We read the same copies of
T. S.
Eliot. We were reading all of that very literary
stuff.
Thomas Hardy,
Jude the Obscure,
Return
of the Native and all of that. I went to college to
be a "college boy," to get an education in those
things. I was keeping up with Esquire
magazine and what Hemmingway was writing, what
Faulkner was writing. I also wanted to know what the
novel had been before. And then there was that
famous Eliot essay: “Tradition and the Individual
Talent.” He was talking about the nature of
tradition.
Tradition is
that which continues. Tradition is not that which is
old but that which survives. It's a stream of human
consciousness. Eliot was saying that if you write
something, even if it's but four lines, it should be
informed, as far as possible, with the whole history
of poetry. I understood that. I was telling my
friend
Wynton Marsalis
when we were talking about
jazz, if you have four bars, it should be informed
by the whole history of jazz. That's when you are
doing your do. Otherwise you'll spend a lot of time
trying to reinvent the sonnet. But if you know
what's in there, what the tradition is, then you are
the cutting edge—that's what the avant garde means:
the cutting edge that is going to continue
tradition, but you're going to redefine it because
your sensibility is different. The combination that
exists in your mind that you are operating out of is
different from anybody else's although it should be
informed by everything that went ahead of you.
Kalamu ya
Salaam: Do you think that your aesthetic and
Ralph's aesthetic were informed by your dual
interest in literature and music?
Albert
Murray: Definitely. Ralph majored in music but I
came to the musical metaphor after I got out of
college. My thing was to read all the books I had
not had time to read when I was in college. The big
thing that happened to me was the discovery of the
great writer
Thomas Mann. I noticed that the great
German composers—and there were none greater at that
time—those composers gave Mann a basis for
organizing literary statement. Mann was talking
about dialectic orchestration. He was talking about
using leitmotif like Wagner did. I said, that's a
way of organizing literary statement. So, where's
mine?
That brought me back to the idiomatic
experience that I was a part of and I was looking
for a way to make my idiomatic experience a part of
the fine art experience. How do you process that,
extend, elaborate, and refine that so that it
becomes universal in terms of its impact. So I said,
"what is it?" and that's when I hit upon the blues
and jazz. I said oh yeah, they have a prelude and a
fugue, I'll have a vamp, and then a series of
choruses, then I'll have a break, etc. The first
character that I wrote was a guitar player called
Louisiana Charlie.
When I was writing him, when he
would throw that guitar over his shoulder and hop a
freight train, to me that was how I could do all
these other resonances. As many resonances as
possible; he was Orpheus. He's got on overalls, he
talks the down home talk but the dynamics, ah,
that's not a new story. You have to find out the old
story and then do your variation on it. See? Orpheus
went to hell and back, well sometimes he would go
away to the penitentiary and then come back. Then I
understood when Mann was talking about leitmotifs, I
could talk about riffs.
I came straight
into the blues and its extension, jazz, whereas
Ralph was into formal European music that you get
when you go to a conservatory. At that time Tuskegee
had a conservatory and it was head by William
Dawson. Ralph was strictly majoring in music, but I
associated him with having those books rather than
his trumpet. I saw him directing the band in the
grandstand during football games. I called him the
student concertmaster. He was a special student at
Tuskegee. He stood out. I never saw him play in any
of the jazz bands however.
By the time
Ralph and I really got together after he was out of
school, I was more involved with jazz and jazz
musicians than he was. Because he was from Oklahoma,
Ralph knew about the Blue Devils and guys like Jimmy
Rushing— they kept in touch for a long time—but
Ralph was not keeping up with the music. So when it
got to be bop time I was making the rounds but Ralph
wasn't. I would go to school at NYU for graduate
classes at night and after classes I would go up to
52nd Street. Ralph was home working on Invisible
Man. Ralph was a little skeptical of bop. He
kept an eye on it. He appreciated the general
aesthetic revolution, but he didn't go to hear it as
much as I did.
I was
interested in the dynamics of the creative process.
Although I didn't want to be a musician as such, I
wanted to be as close as possible to how the stuff
was put together and how the musician thought. So
much of what musicians such as Ellington thought fit
right into what I wanted to do with the language.
The more I knew about the music, the more I could
extend that aesthetic into verbalization.
Everything I
write tries to make the language swing like jazz.
The Invisible Man is more discursive than any
of my books. Ralph liked all the stuff I liked, but
he was really strong on
Dostoyevsky. I was strong on
Tolstoy. I was very much into Mann. Mann was not one
of Ralph's guys. We were together on
Faulkner. I
think Ralph accepted the challenge of Faulkner.
Ralph was so impressed with the heroic dimension
that Faulkner gave to his Negro characters, Ralph
thought that he would have to do that too. My own
personal thing was to say: the brown-skinned
American never sounded better than in
Duke Ellington
and never looked better in print than in Albert
Murray's writing. That was my challenge. That is
what all my aesthetic emphasis adds up to. I have
never thought of myself as a victim. I have always
thought of myself as someone of high potential that
I had to live up to.
In fact, my
central image is a rabbit in a briar patch, which
explains everything I have written. You're in a jam
session situation where you are improvising all the
time; at the same time you can improvise better if
you have a rich background. I want my knowledge to
sing and swing, to evoke, to put you there. Music
makes what you want to move. I want my novels to
make you want to walk that way, want to be that way,
want to react to experiences in that way. That's a
legitimate aesthetic objective. Art is a process
through which raw experience is rendered into
aesthetic statement.
Source:
WordUp
posted 21 May 2010
*
* * * *
music website >
http://www.kalamu.com/bol/
writing website >
http://wordup.posterous.com/
daily blog >
http://kalamu.posterous.com
twitter >
http://twitter.com/neogriot
facebook >
http://www.facebook.com/kalamu.salaam
*
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Trading Twelves
The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
Edited by John Callahan
"I had chosen to re-create
the world, but, like a self-doubting god, was uncertain whether
I could make the pieces fit smoothly together. Well, its done
now and I want to get on to the next one." In this passage from
a 1951 letter to his literary colleague and all-around good
buddy Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison is referring to his
masterpiece Invisible Man; it is both this fly-on-the-wall
intimacy, as well as the now-ironic mention of Ellison's "next,"
never to be completed novel that help to make this book such a
pleasure to read. Ellison was an accomplished and dapper
upperclassman and Murray a respectful but equally ambitious
freshman when they first encountered each other in 1935 at
Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. They were not to become close
friends until 1947, when Murray was studying for his masters
degree in New York City. |
The letters begin in 1949 and end in
1960, when easy long-distance phone calls brought the need for longhand
correspondence (but not their everlasting friendship) to an end. While the
1952 publication of Invisible Man rocketed Ellison to literary stardom, his
letters always treat Murray, who taught at Tuskegee and labored on his own
unpublished first novel until the 1970s, as his genuine equal, both as a
writer and as a cultural thinker. The letters recapitulate their travels
around the world (European fellowships for Ellison and cushy postwar Air
Force assignments for Murray, who was a colonel in the reserve); their
quirky black hipster idiom; Ellison's ambivalence toward Tuskegee and his
responses to literary fame, including a brief description of an encounter
with William Faulkner at the old Random House offices. There are also funny,
thoughtful exchanges on jazz figures, biting comments on literary foes and
ample details of the literary and domestic lives of these two gifted and
iconoclastic American writers.—Publishers
Weekly
* * *
* *
Bill Moyers and James Cone (Interview) /
A Conversation with James Cone
John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
/
A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
* * *
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|
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
|
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As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. |
"Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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