Abstract:
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.
