Albert Murray in his apartment in Harlem, 1970s. Courtesy of the Albert Murray Trust.

American culture, even in its most ­rigidly segregated precincts, is ­patently and ­irrevocably composite . . . 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.” So Albert Murray declared in his first book, The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (1970), an outspoken ­attack on the ideologies of both white supremacy and black separatism. Writing at the height of the Black Power movement, Murray insisted on the centrality of a black sensibility to American life as a whole. He saw American modernism embodied in the great jazz innovators of midcentury and in works of literature like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which Murray called “mainstream American writing in the same sense that U.S. Negro music is mainstream.” In another critical study, Stomping the Blues (1976), Murray placed jazz and the blues in the same ritual tradition that gave rise to lyric poetry, tragedy, and farce.

Murray was born in 1916 in Nokomis, Alabama, and was raised by ­adoptive parents in a poor, black suburb of Mobile. He attended the Tuskegee Institute, where he majored in education and studied modern literature. In 1941, he married Mozelle Menefee. He spent the last two and a half years of World War II in the U.S. Army Air Corps, mostly as a training officer for the Tuskegee Airmen. After ­attending graduate school at New York University on the GI Bill, Murray returned to Tuskegee, where he taught geopolitics in the Air Force ROTC program, then did ­several years of active duty in Morocco and California. It was only after he retired from the military, as a major, and moved back to New York, in 1962, that Murray began to publish the critical essays that made him ­famous. He would also write a memoir, South to a Very Old Place (1971), and several novels, most notably Train Whistle Guitar (1974). Murray died in 2013, ­survived by his wife of seventy-two years and by their daughter, Michele Murray. In 2016, the Library of America published the first volume of his collected works.

Murray’s views on literature, music, and culture had a profound influence on many younger writers and thinkers, including Stanley Crouch, Elizabeth Alexander, James Alan McPherson, Wynton Marsalis, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (In a 1996 New Yorker profile, Gates wrote, “This is Albert Murray’s century; we just live in it.”) The following conversation is taken from the newly discovered transcript of an interview that Gates and Robert G. O’Meally conducted at Murray’s apartment, in Harlem, in 1978. 

For his help in preparing this excerpt, we wish to thank Paul Devlin, the editor of Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues (2016) and, with Gates, of the Library of America volumes. 

—The Editors

INTERVIEWER

In 1953, when the runaway scene from Train Whistle Guitar was first published in New World Writing as “The Luzana Cholly Kick,” you were asked about your intentions as a writer. You responded, “We all learn from Mann, Joyce, Hemingway, Eliot, and the rest, but I’m also trying to learn to write in terms of the tradition I grew up in, the Negro tradition of blues, stomps, ragtime, jumps, and swing. After all, very few writers have done as much with American experience as Jelly Roll Morton, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington.” Is that still a fundamental guideline for you? 

MURRAY

It does represent a fundamental orientation toward craft and content. When I spoke of Jelly Roll Morton, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington, I meant that not many writers have been more successful than these musicians in stylizing American experience. This immediately leads us into a problem that confronts me personally—that not very much of my immediate experience has been processed into literature to my satisfaction. I can’t think of many examples that bear too favorable a comparison to what I’ve experienced of the literature of other cultures. 

INTERVIEWER

You’ve warned in your critical writings and implicitly in your fiction against what you call the pastoral fallacy. What is that?

MURRAY

Ordinarily, a pastoral is a story or poem about shepherds. But I’m borrowing and extending the term from the English critic and poet William Empson. For him, the pastoral is a literary device that involves a curious reversal of human values, a reversal between the upper class and the common man. In a traditional pastoral work, the shepherds are the truly wise ­people and the people from the castle are not so wise. But if you are talking in terms of class struggle, you can start romanticizing the intrinsic ­human ­values found in primitive people. By contrast, people who come from ­highly ­industrialized civilizations may be represented as having ennui or being washed out. 

This is fallacious thinking, it seems to me. Life is just too complex to be seen in these black-and-white terms, and yet, the pastoral is a very appealing literary form, because people do enjoy vacations in the country. It seems to be a good place to live year-round, at least to people who come from the steel mills or from the canyons of Wall Street, from regions of complexities from which everybody would like to escape. 

INTERVIEWER

For the black writer, the fallacy is in making rural characters seem too simplistic. Are there warnings you would give to the black writer who decides he wants to use folklore or the church?

MURRAY

In the U.S. today, among the so-called black writers, you have a romanticism about folk values that is unrealistic—and not unconnected with the Marxist romanticism about the common man. It’s unrealistic because it doesn’t represent a true picture of what folk actually means. If you talk about folklore, you’re talking about hand-me-down ways. Folklore, folkways, folk customs, folk arts, folkcrafts, and such represent what the peasant or the relatively ­unsophisticated person is able to come by, from what is available, what is filtered down from the highest level of technological or philosophical or scientific development in a given time. It’s the popular lore. It is characterized by imprecision, which is not to say that it does not contain values, or that they are not enduring values, but one thing that it specifically lacks is precision. Whether it’s music or medicine—I mean, folk medicine is not very specific medicine. 

INTERVIEWER

Given the way you define the pastoral fallacy, what do you think of the Black Arts movement and its conception of Africa?

MURRAY

My general impression is that they conceived of Africa as a paradise lost, a paradise to be regained, which does not accord at all with my conception of the history of Africa during the slave trade or during the European colonization period or the decolonization period, or of present-day Africa. I think they were romanticizing the past. In this instance, the romanticism was based on very little documentation. I’m constantly amazed at people—writers, spokesmen—who profess to love something but don’t love it enough to find out about it. They don’t love their people well enough to give them accurate information or to do some solid research. I’m amazed at that and exasperated by it. I wish it would go away. 

But the main thing to be said here is that it’s impossible for the American artist to become idiomatically African. And I think it is the processing of the idiomatic—that is, the extension and elaboration and refinement of the idiomatic—that adds up to fine art. 

INTERVIEWER

But you have used literary models as foreign to American experience as Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce.

MURRAY

But here we’re talking about the tradition of human expression, a pervasive tradition that has achieved a universality. If I’m writing a novel, I certainly wouldn’t go to Alaska to find a model, and I wouldn’t go to the left-handed side of the Congo. The same thing would be true if I were leading an orchestra that had a certain type of instrumentation. I would go to such models as exist. In other words, I don’t see the necessity of inventing a new form other than the novel. I might revolutionize it, I might want to paint it various shades of brown, but I would not want to change it. I would want a story to have a hero, for example. You know that about me, that I think a good-looking, brown-skinned guy could be okay—for me that would be the most satisfactory hero of all, and if I could make him compelling enough, he could be as interesting to other people as Ulysses, an ancient Greek, has always been to me. I think that’s the nature of fine art—when it goes beyond the provincial, it becomes universal, and the elements are accessible to mankind at large. But as much as I like Mann, a native German would get more out of him. I have no illusions about being idiomatically Greek in the sense that Homer was. I mean, I’m not too sure that I could be idiomatically Frederick Douglass, although through my grandparents, I’m a bit more idiomatically Frederick Douglass than I am idiomatically Thoreau.

INTERVIEWER

How do you see the modern black writer’s relationship to his “past”? And how does Africa figure into that, legitimately or illegitimately? 

MURRAY

I think a writer’s individuality, his originality, and his achievement of self-hood are all determined by what he accepts of what he inherits, as well as by that which he rejects. Do you follow me? If the black writer looks at his past, he’s going to find much that he can, and will have to, reject. At the same time, he’ll find certain things he can accept, that are orienting for him. They give him a sense of direction, a sense of development. Unfortunately, I think that a number of black writers are so determined to look too much to the past, to set up a pantheon and to move into that pantheon. I keep thinking that if they are serious students of literature and of black experience, they’re going to find very few people to put in a literary pantheon. That’s the problem—the refusal, or not necessarily the refusal but the inability to look clearly at the nature of the so-called black literary heritage in the United States. It’s ­obscured for various reasons. One is that very few of these guys, although they opt to be writers, care very much for literature. Another reason is a sort of unfortunate self-righteousness that develops among people who regard themselves as ­oppressed—they can always make excuses for their ­shortcomings and say, Such and such writers were great but have not received their just deserts because the establishment was prejudiced and would not recognize them. 

I believe, after my good friend Kenneth Burke, that literature is equipment for living. How do you look at the world? Who helps you most to see the world as it is? Now, if I’ve got a bunch of ancestors who simply tell me that the whole problem of life is injustice, then they have not told me enough about what life is. The black literary tradition has let me down in this sense, because it didn’t do the job as well as the fireside tradition or the barbershop tradition in the old days. 

INTERVIEWER

Do you see black literature as being essentially propagandistic? 

MURRAY

Yes, I do. 

INTERVIEWER

Should we back up and say what you mean by propaganda, as opposed to art? 

MURRAY

When the basic purpose of the literary statement is to promote some ­immediate value, some virtue, to counterstate some vice, to sell some program, then I think of it as propaganda. There’s no pure definition of propaganda because every statement has to do with values, but when the complexities of human motive, of human behavior, of human aspiration are oversimplified in the interest of a specific social or political remedy, then we’d call it propaganda. Do you see? Whereas, take a very complex story, let’s say Hamlet. Certainly it’s against corruption, but the way it is presented tells us so much more about life than simply the news that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” 

INTERVIEWER

You’ve compared the kind of heroism that is implicit in blues music to the kind of heroism in Hamlet or the heroism in the Odyssey. You obviously would recommend that a black writer read Hamlet. But would you also want the black writer to begin at home, so to speak? 

MURRAY

Yes, for the very same reason that I don’t want him to begin in Africa, because he doesn’t know a damned thing about Africa. He doesn’t know any of the nuances. He knows everybody, loves everybody. People can’t stand each other living twenty-five miles apart—but he goes over there and he loves them all. We have enough trouble with our own do-gooders and social workers, who come into the so-called black community and put you together with people you don’t want to be with because they do not understand the nuances that define our lives. 

INTERVIEWER

What implications does the kind of heroism implicit in the blues have for the black writer? 

MURRAY

There is so much for me to say about this. That’s why I have to write about it. We need a form that is geared to change, geared to the unexpected. You have to have some type of frame, because the rest is a void. Void is the true nature, void and entropy, the inherent randomness or tendency toward randomness of all existence. You get an idea about how life works, and the next thing you know, things are falling apart. This is what my work is concerned with. I’m trying to live as a human being. Whatever other kind of career is there? You can’t just run around dealing with a lynching when nature itself is lynching you. 

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean? 

MURRAY

I think I was smart enough to take care of a few redneck sheriffs. But when I looked at the ritual that was taking place in a blues performance, what was being reenacted there, I thought I saw a pattern that could be extended in all directions of human life. And since art comes out of life, I figured it was trying to tell us something about accepting disjuncture. 

INTERVIEWER

Let’s say you hear the kind of good-time music that brings people together, as you’ve said, in “a ritual of purification or fertility.” How can the writer who is familiar with the idiom, who grew up with it, use it in his writing?

MURRAY

It’s not a matter of simply recording the idiom. It’s not a matter of ripping it off. It’s a matter of realizing the attitudes toward experience that the music expresses. It has a certain way of organizing experience. It creates an incomparable intensity, an unflagging interest. It expresses life in its complexity. It makes all these statements using devices—techniques, conventions, even ­instruments—that are not necessarily original to the blues idiom but function in a particular way in the blues idiom. The voicing is familiar, is equivalent to the voicings of people—the people we know, the voices that are most familiar to us, so that a jazz band sounds like our equivalent of a symphony orchestra. So the jazz composition is a blues-idiom sonata, but a sonata that has its own elements—it has its vamp, it has its own peculiar ensembles, its solo, statement, and response, its use of leapfrogging statements from one soloist to the other, its use of conversation or even colloquy. You might have three soloists come out and talk to each other or you might have them spliced with responses and the responses may be statements that are very, very familiar. They’re just like the preacher getting answers from the amen corner. The more you study them, the more you realize that they’re based on something solid in the experience peculiar to the idiom. And they’re used as a basic organizing principle for artistic statement, which means there is some basic thing around which the experience is organized. Do you realize that the cathedral is a stylization of the cross? And the cross worn by Catholics is a stylization of the instrument of torture and destruction. It’s a symbol people respond to. They already have a great emotional investment in it. So when the writer looks into modes of expression that are most intimate to his experience, that’s equivalent to what the jazz musician or the jazz composer does. 

INTERVIEWER

Jelly Roll Morton, if I remember correctly, defines jazz in terms of its use of breaks. How might the writer use the break in jazz as the cross with which to make his cathedral?

MURRAY

The break is the time when you do your thing. It’s the moment of creativity or the moment of heroism—when the disjunctive, destructive element enters and you become creative. Structurally, the break heightens the flow of the music, adds dramatic intensity, and provides for a parenthetical insertion, which might be an aside or any number of other things. 

INTERVIEWER

So you see the break as an opportunity for the soloist in the same way that, in literature, the chaotic situation is the opportunity for the hero to be heroic. 

MURRAY

Look, any situation or confrontation described in Viennese mythology is trauma producing. That’s essentially an antidramatic mythology. You say, Boo, get the dragon away. Whereas I say, The hell with that, get ready to fight the dragon. Is your sword ready? Are your lamps trimmed and burning? That’s preparation. That’s the epic mode. In Attitudes Toward History, Kenneth Burke talks about frames of acceptance and frames of rejection. The big frame of acceptance is the epic frame—accepting the facts of life as the basis of life. You accept that life is a struggle and you accept, therefore, the responsibility of being prepared for the struggle. He goes on to extend the theory that in certain stages of development, civilizations featured epic literature because the harsh demands of nature were a basic fact of life.

If someone wanted to make a sociological interpretation, they could say, Well, Murray has seen fit to say that the struggle of black citizens is such that in this stage of their civilization they should use the epic. But I was raised in the context of epic heroism, and all the expectations of my childhood that were put on me by my elders were those of the epic hero. Fortunately, since I was reading about epic heroes, fairy tales, and things like that, it all made sense to me. And no goddamned sociologist has ever been able to talk me out of it. I would have my sword and have it sharpened and have my resilience and have my courage. Anybody who tries to talk me out of courage and out of strength and out of resilience and out of skill is not my friend. I don’t care if he’s got a million dollars. Those who have played down courage in the interest of welfare programs have been awfully misguided, I think, to the extent that their literature reflects this. 

INTERVIEWER

The way you define the imperative of idiom sounds at times awfully like how the Black Nationalist artists in the sixties defined the relationship that the black artist should bear to his past, yet your writing seems diametrically ­opposed to the Black Arts movement. How do you account for the difference?

MURRAY

One of the main elements of the Black Arts movement, as I understood it, was alienation, a sort of racist-inspired alienation, and I think it led to a shrill insistence on a sort of me-tooism—they seemed to want everything that other people wanted, but they wanted to paint it black. The difference would be to take charge of everything. Instead of somebody saying we once had that but the white folks wouldn’t recognize it, I want to say that what you formally look for in Proust and Joyce and Mann and Hemingway and Faulkner, you have to find in Murray and his followers. I’m playing, but there’s a serious element in there. 

I grew up in a school system in which we studied black literature. Negro History Week was always celebrated. We had pictures of Negro builders and heroes. I knew about Benjamin Brawley and Carter G. Woodson before I knew about Charles A. Beard. I used Alain Locke’s The New Negro when I was in the eleventh grade to get material for my oratorical-contest essay. In that essay, I recited Langston Hughes’s poem “Youth.” I first learned of the scholarly necessity of bibliography from Monroe N. Work, who was at Tuskegee. These things have never been foreign to me. But I have never been able to tolerate the type of black-ism that is only a sort of me-tooism. I find nothing inadequate about what I was taught in grade school and in high school about being a contemporary man, about being an American, about being a man of the twentieth century. But I could never tolerate the braggadocio of people who were not prepared to evaluate the things they were making great claims for. Now, I’m not claiming a freedom from chauvinism. I’m not interested in being free of chauvinism. Who was more chauvinistic than I was about Jack Johnson? But I always had to have something solid to be chauvinistic about. And I thought Jack Johnson’s credentials were impeccable. I didn’t want to be put in the position of being proud of something that was not worthy of pride.