Conversations with Albert Murray

edited by Roberta S. Maguire

As a cultural critic, biographer, essayist, and novelist, Albert Murray has had a wide-ranging and profound influence on American art in the decades since the Second World War. Artists as diverse as Walker Percy, Romare Bearden, and Wynton Marsalis have drawn from Murray and his ideas on jazz and the blues, modern consciousness, and the role of race in the American identity. His own works include The Hero and the Blues, Train Whistle Guitar, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as Told to Albert Murray, The Spyglass Tree, The Blue Devils of Nada, and The Seven Leagues Boots. Yet this is the first book devoted to Murray himself, and fittingly it is based on the kind of conversations that have proven indispensable to his friends in the arts. It brings together twenty interviews with Murray conducted over the last twenty-four years, beginning with an interview shortly after his second book, South to a Very Old Place, was published, and ending with a previously unpublished interview with Roberta S. Maguire. In these conversations Murray discusses those who influenced him-Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington-and tells how they helped him develop a philosophy of art based on the blues as well as a new archetype of the American hero, the blues hero. This collection reveals a man who enjoys a good time and a good conversation, a man whose intellectual improvisations move over such subjects as his reminiscences about his native South, his insights about regional culture, and commentaries about the contemporary American scene.

Roberta S. Maguire teaches English at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh