Albert Murray

Albert Murray (born May 12, 1916, Nokomis, Alabama, U.S.—died August 18, 2013, Harlem, New York) was an African American essayist, critic, and novelist whose writings assert the vitality and the powerful influence of black people in forming American traditions.

Murray attended Tuskegee Institute (B.S., 1939; later Tuskegee University) and New York University (M.A., 1948); he also taught at Tuskegee. In 1943 he entered the U.S. Air Force (known then as the U.S. Army Air Forces), from which he retired as a major in 1962.

Murray’s first collection of essays, The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (1970), used historical fact, literature, and music to attack false perceptions of black American life. He recorded his visit to scenes of his segregated boyhood during the 1920s in his second published work, South to a Very Old Place (1971). In Stomping the Blues (1976), Murray maintained that blues and jazz musical styles developed as affirmative responses to misery; he also explored the cultural significance of these music genres and other artistic genres in The Hero and the Blues (1973), The Blue Devils of Nada (1996), and From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity (2001).

Murray also cowrote Count Basie’s autobiography, Good Morning Blues (1985), and was active in the creation of the concert series Jazz at Lincoln Center. In addition, he published Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000), a poetry collection, and a tetralogy of novels—Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991), The Seven League Boots (1995), and The Magic Keys (2005).