Albert Murray in 1997: A Hero at Home in Harlem
In honor of Albert Murray, whose birthday was last week on May 12th, I’m posting a piece I composed 25 years ago. To this day, I feel that Professor Robert O’Meally’s conversation with Murray at the Schomburg Center in late 1997 is the very best public interview that Murray ever gave. I hope that one day the Schomburg will share this treasure with the public.
Professor Robert G. O’Meally
I thought it would never happen. For years I had wondered why Albert Murray, author of numerous books on American culture and Black American life, who lives three blocks from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, had never been featured at this citadel of black history. On Thursday night, November 6,1997, I was proven wrong. As part of the annual City College Langston Hughes Festival, Murray discussed his oeuvre at the Schomburg with one of the foremost scholars of his work, Columbia University Professor of Literature, Robert O'Meally. The very next evening Murray received the Langston Hughes Award medallion, givenannually to a black writer who has made distinguished contributions to the arts and letters.
O’Meally began the evening's discussion by comparing the way Proust used a madeleine to evoke the past to the way Murray uses music to trigger memories and inspire his literary efforts. Ellington's "Harlem Air Shaft" filled the auditorium with the swinging, conversational sounds of the Big Apple. O'Meally set the stage for Murray by stating that the music is not nostalgia, but rather has contemporary value as fine art. Murray continued:
Absolutely. So, when you are talking about American heritage it means that which endures. This is as much of a classic as anything that exists in music. I submit that the spirit of no city has been captured more effectively, more comprehensively, and more movingly than Harlem, and therefore Manhattan [than] in this particular piece... I don't think Mozart could get Prague any better... It has the whole spirit of American energy, of American experimentation, of American elegance as we define it uptown. As great a city as Paris is, I don't think you could find music that captures Paris any better than Duke captured Manhattan.
To set the tone for the opening vamp of his 1971 classic, South to a Very Old Place, Ellington's "Take the ‘A’ Train" filled the space. As the jaunty tune played in the background, Murray read the intro to his second book, which is somehow a travel memoir and novel all-in-one. In this riff-like literary composition on the idea of home, Murray recalled the myths, people, and places of his past, creating a work that maintains relevance in the eternal present. As in his other works of fiction to date (Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, and The Seven League Boots), Murray also recalled the sights, sounds, smells, and the tastes of home. In Murray's work, said O’Meally, food as well as music will take you home. Murray got chuckles of resonance from the audience when he explained that every so often he gets a call from someone he grew up with who will complain that reading his novels "Makes me hungry as hell!"
Another thread that winds through Murray's work is the meaning of the blues. Although some view the blues as a music of lamentation and sorrow, Murray countered:
You play the blues to get rid of the blues, not to lament them. Any preacher will tell you that blues is good-time music. That's why they play it at a Saturday night function and not at a Sunday morning service. If the blues were what the sociologists say it is, they would play the blues at a prayer meeting. But when we play the blues, we want to get it on... After all Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were not writing for college professors, they were writing for beer drinkers and wine drinkers. These plays were performed as part of a Dionysian ritual, a Bacchanalian ritual and people were getting it on. So don't tell me about jazz coming from Storyville. What better place for art to come from than a fertility ritual?
O'Meally asked Murray about the meaning of the title of his 1976 work, Stomping the Blues. After demonstrating the relaxed, smooth cadence of swing by snapping his fingers and tilting his head oh so slightly to the left with the beat, Murray explained: "It's insouciance, that don't-carefied strut. The blues can't stand that... When they were stomping at the Savoy, they were playing some real fancy figures. They were tripping the light fantastic. That's the most effective way of getting rid of the blues. Machine guns won't do it."
O'Meally compared Murray to Joyce with respect to a rhythmic hipness and modernist playfulness with language and idiom, which, in Joyce's case, involved blarney. Murray's response revealed that Joyce was a lion in his path, a very worthy competitor:
Oh, yes. Finnegans Wake. But we can't let them get away with that! We can't have blarney swinging harder than jive! You legitimize jive as literary expression not by thinking of yourself as being in rebellion as the Beat poets [did]. They thought it was protest and rebellion. But to us it's a discipline, a way of getting with something. You really have to know what you're doing to go out on the floor at the Savoy. You have your shoes shined, your crease right. Then you go out there and do all of that stuff without being disheveled.
To further clarify elements in Murray's work, O’Meally discussed the way Murray defines jazz as both a conversational music and a music of individual assertion. If someone wants to hear jazz the way Murray perceives it, O'Meally suggested, the soloist should be viewed as a character who perseveres and makes his way no matter what the changes are, and will come out through it "sounding boss." This is the way Murray connects the hero of fairy tales and novels to the blues idiom tradition of jazz.
In The Hero and the Blues, I use the blues as a frame of reference within which to define heroic action. The moment of truth of course is improvising on the break. And the break is when the monster comes in or just the cessation of the cadence. On a certain level, we know it in America. We say 'give me a break.' Let something happen so I can have my opportunity. That's an affirmative attitude toward experience. When you think of antagonistic cooperation, the problem cooperates with you to make you a hero. If you look at a problem and just protest, get angry, you feel sorry for yourself. But it doesn't add up to heroic action. I submit that the blues is about heroic action. Not being disoriented when the established cadence ends.
Coming to the close of the discussion, O'Meally explained how Murray also uses jazz music as a structural device. Many jazz songs begin with an intro called a vamp, and then continue to the melody, breaks, choruses, solos, ending at times with a tag or out chorus. Murray used this structure in South to a Very Old Place. About his out chorus Murray said: "It is the epitome of affirmation. It’s when you are ready to go out and take on the problems that are there." To exemplify what he means by the last phrase in the book—"rhapsodized thunder and syncopated lightening"—Murray shared a version of Count Basie's brisk "Doggin’ Around." He called this kind of song a Scooter tune; Scooter is the name of his fictional alter-ego who, like Brer Rabbit in the briar patch, moved nimbly, avoiding the sticky, narrow, deceptive clutches of the tar baby of social science through the wisdom of the humanities. “Doggin’ Around” captured the sound of the United States for him when he graduated from the Tuskegee Institute in 1939.
With a mischievous twinkle in his eye, and his tongue placed firmly in his cheek, Murray, who is a member of the Century Club and was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, stroked the audience with a mocking grace worthy of his hero Duke Ellington: "I thought that if I could handle myself on the breaks of life like these soloists, then I'd be worthy of being invited to read at the Schomburg!"