In early 1996, Albert Murray agreed to talk to me for a half hour about my dissertation research in his Harlem apartment, a conversation that quickly turned into an epic four-hour mentor–disciple discussion about music, dance, and vernacular American culture. I was then building my theory of jazz and industrialization on two of Murray’s critical terms from his masterpiece, Stomping the Blues. First, there was his idea that Black music, dance, and culture lay at the core of American society’s “survival technology,” or “survival technique.” Second, his framework that all distinctively American music started with the fusion of Black vernacular music and industrialization in the late 1800s, specifically through “locomotive onomatopoeia” ― Murray’s poetic, evocative phrase for the sounds and rhythms of trains.
Well into the 20th century, Americans worshiped trains, and for good reason: trains were both the biggest, fastest machines in the landscape and the loudest technological object in the sound-scape. In effect, the locomotive was the nation’s totemic symbol of progress, moving confidently into the future. Between the Civil War and World War II, musicians of all kinds transformed and stylized train rhythms into a propulsive sonic grammar for the young nation.
I asked Murray about locomotive onomatopoeia, and he quoted something Duke Ellington had told him: “‘Jazz is [often] a matter of onomatopoeia, and so the question is, ‘What are you imitating?'” I then presented my hypothesis on this theme for the big band jazz of the Swing Era, a musical culture that overlapped with the Great Depression (1930-1945). I theorized that big band jazz musicians started by imitating and stylizing train rhythms, then added in factory rhythms and the urban, industrial soundscape; bandleaders such as Ellington and Count Basie mixed it all into the surging, precise, loud, propulsive dance music of the swing era. In short, the musicians were imitating, then swinging, the machines.
Big band jazz musicians of the swing era had created an industrial aesthetic tuned to a functional purpose. Ellington, Basie, Benny Goodman et al had transmuted mechanical rhythms into the primal human pleasures of music and dance. My theory was that this was the historical and cultural reason for the enormous popularity of big bands during the Great Depression. And I wondered: perhaps all Americans needed to “dance” with their technology. This may be more true today, with electronics, than it was during the manufacturing-based economy of the 1930s. Just look at the machine-centric genres of the past two generations: hiphop, techno, electronica, EDM (Electronic Dance Music). But jazz musicians were the first to imitate and stylize machine rhythms, and they did it with acoustic instruments only, not synthesizers or drum machines.
Murray immediately saw merit in my theory, first, “because jazz has the onomatopoetic quality built in,” and second, “because [jazz is] flexible enough to adapt to it.” That was all the encouragement I then needed, and a good thing, too, because after this initial exchange our conversation dissolved into the controlled whirlwind of Albert Murray’s intellectual universe. “Hector Boletho” he cried out happily and waved me over to the stepladder near his bookshelves and up, up, up, “second shelf from the top, thin volume named Leviathan.”
After this initial exchange our conversation dissolved into the controlled whirlwind of Albert Murray’s intellectual universe. "Hector Boletho" he cried out happily and waved me over to the stepladder near his bookshelves and up, up, up, "second shelf from the top, thin volume named Leviathan."
He pointed me to the essay, “The Sound of the Zeitgeist,” in which Boletho recognized the symbolic revolution of the saxophone ― a brassy, noisy American instrument ― as it displaced the European violin in the music halls and movie theaters of the 1920s. Then we spoke of the elegant urban dance-halls of the 1930s and he roared, “Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 1942, third shelf.” Then it was onto American existentialism, “Hemingway, Winner Take Nothing, nineteen and thirty-three, bottom shelf.”
After an hour delving into Murray’s archaeology of knowledge, he told me his five-stage theory of art. When a new art form emerged (stage one), its aesthetic innovations are often a shock to the system ― a cultural revolution ― such that the first artists achieve a near-sacred cultural power. These artistic innovations then become absorbed into culture through art, fashion, design, and commerce (stages two and three), until there is a declension into the formulaic (stage four), and the art form becomes recreational (stage five). This theory applied equally to punk rock and abstract expressionism, I thought, aesthetics at opposite ends of the artistic spectrum. Art is about transcending something, Murray concluded, while deep play is about transmuting something. At the time, I thought this was a compelling synthesis of Nietzsche and the Tao Te Ching.
Art is about transcending something, Murray concluded, while deep play is about transmuting something. At the time, I thought this was a compelling synthesis of Nietzsche and the Tao Te Ching.
At this point, Murray stood up slowly on his four-pronged silver cane and said, “It’s time we had some Armagnac.” I didn’t even know what Armagnac was at the time. We slowly walked over to a rolling bar where he opened up three or four small jewel boxes. They were small, engraved silver chalices, one for each of his books. He pointed: Which one did I want to drink from? I was too honored to speak, but I managed to point to Good Morning Blues, the autobiography he wrote with Count Basie. Murray drank from The Seven-League Boots, his most recent novel in the epic Scooter saga.
The Armagnac break led to an insight. Albert Murray’s major subject was affirmation vs. existential angst: his field was art and aesthetics. At heart, he was a metaphysician, something that would have been more clear if he entitled The Blue Devils of Nada, his work on aesthetic theory, something like Blues and Nothingness. This title would have both signified on Jean-Paul Sartre’s iconic Being and Nothingness, and signaled that Murray’s book dealt with similar concerns. Novelist Charles Johnson calls Murray “an existential humanist,” a phrase that riffs on Sartre’s essay, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” and Murray considered the Blues itself to be a form of African-American existentialism.
Murray understood this connection twenty years before he theorized it. In an exchange of letters from 1953, Murray and his close friend Ralph Ellison analyzed their recent readings of Sartre, Camus, and others: they agreed that French existentialism was highbrow survival technique for an intellectual white elite. Together they asserted that the Blues was an existential art form, created by and for African-Americans to critically engage depression or the “blue devils.” (“Blue devils” was once a phrase synonymous with malaise or depression.) The key difference between existentialism and the blues idiom, the two friends agreed, was the latter’s accessibility across class, having emerged from the more daunting psychological challenge of overcoming slavery and racism.
Albert Murray's major subject was affirmation vs. existential angst: his field was art and aesthetics. At heart, he was a metaphysician, something that would have been more clear if he entitled The Blue Devils of Nada, his work on aesthetic theory, something like Blues and Nothingness.
For Murray, Ernest Hemingway and Joan Didion, Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith, all existed on a continuum of survival technology for American society. They were all existential innovators creating affirmative culture for everyday people to interpret their lives. And that was just the American cast in Stomping the Blues. Murray was the hippest intellectual of the twentieth century: his prose voice jazzed up James Joyce by way of Count Basie’s rhythm section; his theory of blues affirmation came from Kenneth Burke via Andre Malraux; the narrative structure of his novels came from combining Thomas Mann’s epic novels with Ellington’s compositional method. This entire cast is name-checked in Stomping the Blues, and yet the color line often drawn in scholarship frames Murray as solely a Black intellectual writing for African-Americans. This Jim-Crowing of American cultural analysis hurts all concerned.
For an art form as misunderstood as the Blues, Murray’s Stomping the Blues exploded into an analytical vacuum upon publication in 1976. He analyzes the Blues as a jewel of many facets: there is a chapter on the genre name itself, then one on the Blues as sung, the Blues as danced, the Blues as played in jazz, and finally, the Blues as live music ritual. In Murray’s framework, the Blues functioned as secular liturgical music for the “Saturday Night Function” at Southern Black night clubs, with the bluesman/blueswoman as conductor for the catharsis of a Black working class reckoning with the “blue devils” of denied personhood. Its obverse was the gospel music played at the “Sunday Morning Service,” the sacred version of this ritual catharsis through the spirituals and sermons of Afro-Christianity.
The book is an artwork in and of itself. Murray narrates Stomping The Blues in prose as exuberant as Count Basie’s biggest hit, “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” and his analysis is punctuated with jubilant photos of musicians and dancers (and trains!) that send home each point with visual exclamation. Murray often quoted theorist Kenneth Burke’s philosophy of language as symbolic action, in particular his phrase, “the dancing of an attitude.” In effect, Stomping the Blues was Murray’s case study of the Blues as a musical language whose symbolic acts manifested in the dancing of a specific African-American attitude. To kick off his analysis, Murray quotes one of Burke’s favorite phrases ― “literature is equipment for living” ― while slyly implying that readers substitute “The Blues” or “Black music.” This makes for a concise thesis: “The Blues is equipment for living.”
Murray’s major success was to theorize two of the formative aesthetic elements of what W.E.B. DuBois called “the gifts” of the slaves to American culture. First and foremost, the affirmative impulse that lay in every American groove to pulsate and rejuvenate the spirit, from ragtime to rock-and-roll to hip-hop. As Murray told me “Everybody profits by the affirmative outlook the slaves had on life [to survive].” Second, there is the quality of improvisation ― the room carved out for individuality ― that started in jazz, something he theorizes in The Hero and the Blues. To Murray, every heroic figure must be an improviser, a mythic figure who leads a people ― symbolically or in real life ― through the terror of chaos or the void.
Murray notes the peak heroic challenge of jazz is what musicians call “the break.” This occurs when a jazz ensemble drops out, leaving a single musician to face the existential void of silence. At that moment, the soloing musician has to spontaneously compose something worthy of getting the band and the audience over to the other side. It is akin to a writer facing the blank page, except at a higher level of difficulty since this symbolic act often happens in public and in real time.
The soloing musician has to spontaneously compose something worthy of getting the band and the audience over to the other side. It is akin to a writer facing the blank page, except at a higher level of difficulty since this symbolic act often happens in public and in real time.
As Murray explained the aesthetic challenge of the break to me, he suddenly stopped for a second, looked up to see if I understood, then jumped through time and space back to Harlem in the 1930s to drive home the existential point: “Because every day it’s either … cut your throat or be down at the Savoy [Ballroom] by 9:30.” In other words, the importance of music and dance to African-Americans, I understood right then, is that musicians and dancers collaborate in a rejuvenatory, affirmative ritual. Together, everyone stomps their blues (and their dangerous blue devils) away.
At one point, Murray criticized his disciple Wynton Marsalis’s epic composition Blood on the Fields for the somber movements that represent slavery. “You gotta have some affirmation in there,” he said, as if to himself. “You a colored boy,” he added as if Marsalis was sitting with us, “[and] Black folks gotta cut loose sometime.” I can only add one major thing to this aesthetic achievement of the Blues through its global appeal: everyone has to cut loose sometime. And everyone mostly cuts loose to music indebted to twentieth-century African-American methods of musical and cultural practice. This is no longer a black-white cultural thing in terms of artistry or critical engagement, and yet we continue to make it so.
Murray is rarely quoted on discussions of race, since his insistence on a sophisticated, affirmative Black culture runs counter to most contemporary theories of racism. Yet in his first book, The Omni-Americans (1970), he reckoned quite directly with key aspects of race. He wrote that the erasure of African-American contributions to the nation’s culture was integral to “the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology.” In this one resonant phrase, Murray caught the zero-sum game of white identity. In addition, he is the only writer to point out how and why the term “non-white” is racist. As he wrote, aren’t whites equally “non-Black”? So why isn’t this term used? The common use of “non-white” designates every person of color as a negative, as an object inferior to the norm (and thus “ab-normal”), as a racial Other. (This kind of linguistic racism is something I teach in all my classes.)
In all these ways, Albert Murray remains America’s most radical pluralist. When Murray famously claimed the nation’s culture is “incontestably mulatto” in The Omni-Americans, he was referring to two crucial concepts. First, African-American music, dance, and language lies at the core of American culture through Black aesthetics and kinesthetics, through the group’s linguistic creativity and humor. Logically then, every American, regardless of race or ethnicity, shares a multi-racial, multi-ethnic cultural birthright based on the nation’s formative intermixture and its ongoing cultural exchange. “Incontestably mulatto” is an awkward phrase to be sure, but The Omni-Americans was published more than twenty-five years before any positive “mixed-race” identity existed.
Four hours in conversation with Albert Murray felt like forty minutes, and I felt it was time to go. Before leaving, I asked Murray for his thoughts on the aesthetic concept of cool; I was just beginning my inquiry into its origins in Black jazz culture. “Cool is just the [aesthetic] stylization of everyday life,” he said simply. Did he mean something like what jazz pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith once said about a rival’s slow, elegant physical gestures, “that every movement was like a picture?” Exactly, he nodded. We then discussed our mutual admiration of saxophonist Lester Young, the jazz legend who disseminated our modern usage of the word “cool” and created jazz’s cool aesthetic. At that point, he repeated the leitmotif of the entire afternoon: “Remember: The first object of aesthetic statement is to affect the mind.”
We then discussed our mutual admiration of saxophonist Lester Young, the jazz legend who disseminated our modern usage of the word "cool" and created jazz's cool aesthetic. At that point, he repeated the leitmotif of the entire afternoon: "Remember: The first object of aesthetic statement is to affect the mind."
This I understood: art and aesthetics are never simply about style or entertainment, vanity or virtuosity. Art is embodied philosophy enacted as a form of cultural leadership. I learned this from reading Murray; from talking with him, it became ingrained in my work.
Finally, Murray has few peers in his understanding of the artist’s role in a democracy. On this subject, his work belongs in any conversation that runs from Emerson, Whitman, and de Tocqueville through to John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, and Richard Rorty. All of Murray’s nonfiction books braid three things: American vernacular art and aesthetics; the philosophy of the Blues (broadly conceived); and the Black struggle for social equality within freedom. I believe his writings on American society, culture, and race will not only endure but be found prescient.
Albert Murray was a hero of the blues. It is up to scholars, intellectuals, and Americans of every ethnicity to catch up to his pluralist vision of the embodied philosophies of Black music. It is a global legacy by which the human race continues to stomp its blues away, individually and socially and generationally, whether listening and dancing to blues or soul, funk or house music, techno or hip-hop.