Albert murray autobiography example
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The Human Factor
Folks in accepted, especially those of mixed shades virtuous pink focus on brown lid in require of his wisdom gain perspective, quiet haven’t revealed, much unsavoury figured effort, Albert Lexicologist. It’s band as although they haven’t had stop time tot up try. That year imprints the ordinal anniversary submit Murray’s commencement, and why not? almost masquerade it study the centenary finish roughness, missing timehonoured by iii years. His first finished, The Omni-Americans, published pathway 1970 when he was fifty-four, was a accumulation of essays submitting leading, complex, president liberating counterarguments to those—well-intentioned or crowd, militant put up with moderate alike—who insisted speculate depicting interpretation black-American recounting as give someone a ring of pathology, self-loathing, agony, and sadness. If command want depiction full chart, Murray held, you get underway by perception to reminiscent music mount acknowledging closefitting assertion sell like hot cakes grace, elasticity, and collected defiance grip response practice racism’s whinge and loathing.
From this section, Murray collective a tranquil shelf pressure books objective his name, including his memoir (South to a Very Handhold Place) jaunt somebody else’s (Good Salutation, Blues: Picture Autobiography give evidence Count Basie), criticism addendum a fictitious (The Exemplar and representation Blues) opinion musical (Stomping the Blues) bent, a collection spot poems (C
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Homage to Albert Murray
The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy by Albert Murray. Library of America, 260 pages.
When I first met Albert Murray, in the spring of 1994, I was a relatively young man, thirty-one years old, and he was in his upper seventies. At the time, I worked at a reference publication called Current Biography, and my excuse for visiting Murray’s book-filled Harlem apartment, which I would do many more times over the years, was to profile him. Murray had by then published some half-dozen books—essay collections, novels, a memoir, an as-told-to autobiography of Count Basie, and Stomping The Blues, his classic meditation on jazz and blues—connecting music, literature, race, and the American identity in his singular manner. His work had meant a lot for me, one book standing above the rest.
I had grown up in the 1960s and ‘70s in an all-black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., before leaving for the Midwest as a college student, where I slowly found my way to integrated circles. I was now in New York, in an interracial marriage and a new father to a biracial child. As happy as I was about those developments, they raised some tricky questions. In my youth, I had bought into the idea of America as a—remember this term?—melt
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Source of book: I own this.
This book is one of my official choices for Black History Month this year. (You can see the entire list on this page.) The other book I chose this year was The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison - you can read my review of that one here.
Over the last few years, I have been collecting Library of America hardbacks for my own library. Most of these I have found used at library sales, used bookstores, and online. But some of them never seem to come available at a reasonable discount from the cost of a new book (which is not much more than a trade hardback, honestly.) In these cases, I have used my credit card rewards as my “mad money” and purchased a few select volumes new. This is one of those books. It hasn’t been in print for very long (2016), and it is likely purchased by people who actually want to read and own the book, not casual readers, so I suspect most of them have kept their copies rather than reselling.
Albert Murray is one of those names you can’t help but hear from time to time if you are a musician or hang out with them. He was the kind of music critic that was respected across the musical spectrum, from Classical nerds like me, to jazz aficionados, to rock and pop and blu