Thomas, Lorenzo. “The Black Roots Are Back.” Re-
view of Mumbo Jumbo, by Ishmael Reed. In The
Critical Response to Ishmael Reed, edited by Bruce
Allen Dick, 38–41. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,
1999.
Brian Flota
Murray, Albert (1916– )
Born in Nokomis, Alabama, the novelist, cultural
critic, essayist, and poet Albert Murray graduated
from Tuskegee Institute in 1939. He undertook
graduate work at the University of Michigan and
at New York University, where he completed a
master’s degree in English in 1948. At Tuskegee, he
met RALPH ELLISON, author of INVISIBLE MAN, and
the two would later seal a lifelong friendship dur-
ing Murray’s New York sojourn. Though he was at
work on a novel during the early 1950s, the same
time that Ellison was completing his masterpiece,
Murray would not publish his first book until
1970, almost 20 years later.
Murray’s oeuvre may be characterized as an ef-
fort at first defining and then putting into practice
the idea of the “BLUES idiom,” which he introduces
in The Omni-Americans (1970) and continues to
develop in such subsequent nonfiction titles as
The Hero and the Blues (1973), Stomping the Blues
(1985), The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary
American Approach to Aesthetic Statement (1996),
and most recently From the Briarpatch File: On
Context, Procedure, and American Identity (2001).
A key phrase, the blues idiom signifies, at base, a
“definitive statement” that echoes the intent of a
song such as Duke Ellington’s dance tune “It Don’t
Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” For
Murray, the blues, a musical form distinguishable
from the affective condition known as “having
the blues,” constitutes “an affirmative and hence
exemplary heroic response to that which André
Malraux describes as la condition humaine” (The
Omni-Americans, 89). Such heroic action generally
takes place in the face of chaos or irruption, which
are themselves characteristic of life’s flow. Life is,
Murray concludes, a “lowdown dirty shame” and
is best met with a sense of acceptance of its vicis-
situdes and a determination to overcome its ob-
stacles through improvisation.
Such a principle for living is wholly consis-
tent with the blues, which translates and refines
the hardships and particularities of everyday life
into an art form. When Murray talks of “refin-
ing,” he means “ragging, jazzing, and riffing and
even jamming the idiomatic into fine art” (Blue
Devils, 93). The art of the blues thus assumes an
agency of sorts, and the dance hall—necessary
to the swinging, physical movement that allows
one actively to employ the body in stomping the
blues away—becomes a “temple” (Stomping, 17).
Likewise, the dance becomes ritual, and the lyr-
ics and music (together constitutive of a blues
idiom) become sacred lingua. Is the blues musi-
cian then priest or oracle? Murray’s concept is,
he admits, Dionysian: a fabulous invocation that
leads us to regard the blues performance as par-
ticipatory theatre and as a syncopated expres-
sive performance act that recalls the catharsis of
tragic drama. The blues also acts as a purgative
ritual that cleanses the participants of the nega-
tive affects of the blues, but cleanses them only to
a certain extent. Murray insists that some trace of
the blues remains to remind the supplicant that
life itself is a never-ending struggle and that one
should not only expect but also thrive on and
within adversity (Stomping, 17).
The Blue Devils of Nada and From the Briar-
patch File serve as elaborations on this theme. The
aim of Blue Devils is “to suggest (as does The Hero
and the Blues) that the affirmative disposition
toward the harsh actualities of human existence
that is characteristic of the fully orchestrated
blues statement can be used as a basis upon which
(and/or frame of reference within which) a con-
temporary storybook heroism may be defined”
(7). Art—literary, visual, and musical—“is the
ultimate extension, elaboration, and refinement
of the rituals that reenact the primary survival
techniques (and hence reinforce the basic orien-
tation toward experience) of a given people in a
given time, place, and circumstance” (13). The
blues hero relates a “representative anecdote” (a
phrase borrowed from Kenneth Burke) because
he is, Murray maintains, a “representative man”:376 Murray, Albert