Flint Public Library (Middleton)

Collected essays & memoirs, Albert Murray ; Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin, editors

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 956-1020) and index

index present

non fiction

Collected essays & memoirs

bibliography

936192059

Albert Murray ; Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin, editors

The library of America, 284

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

Albert Murray, collected essays & memoirsCollected essays and memoirsAlbert Murray, collected essays and memoirs