Collected essays & memoirs
(2016)
By:
Murray, Albert
Nonfiction
Book
Series:
Library of America
#284
Call Numbers:
814.54/MURRAY,A
Availability
Details
PUBLISHED
New York, NY : The Library of America, [2016]
©2016
©2016
DESCRIPTION
xi, 1049 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN/ISSN
9781598535037, 159853503X, 9781598535037
LANGUAGE
English
SERIES
Library of America #284
NOTES
Selected nonfiction writings originally published 1964-2004
CONTENTS
Omni-Americans : some alternatives to the folklore of white supremacy.
The Omni-Americans (The Omni-Americans (A natural history : E pluribus unum ; White norms for black deviation ; Paleface fables, brownskin people ; The blues idiom and the mainstream)) ;
The illusive black image (Introduction ; Image and unlikeness in Harlem ; Oneupmanship in colorful America ; The illusive black middle class ;
Two case histories (Claude Brown's soul for white folks ; Gordon Parks out of focus) ;
Who that say, what dat, every time us do that? ;
A clutch of social science fiction fiction (Star-crossed melodrama ; Warren Miller and his black face vaudeville ; William Styron and his troublesome property) ; James Baldwin, protest fiction, and the blues tradition) ;
Getting it together (Identity, diversity, and the mainstream (A short history of black self-consciousness ; The role of the pre-American past)) ; Black pride in Mobile, Alabama ; Black studies and the aims of education) ;
Epilogue : Situation normal : all fouled up --
South to a very old place.
New York ;
New Haven ;
Greensboro ;
Atlanta ;
Tuskegee ;
Mobile ;
New Orleans, Greenville, Memphis --
Hero and the blues.
The social function of the story teller ;
The dynamics of heroic action ;
The blues and the fable in the flesh --
Stomping the blues.
The blues as such ;
The blues face to face ;
The blue devils and the holy ghost ;
The blues as music ;
Blues music as such ;
Singing the blues ;
Playing the blues ;
Swinging the blues ;
Kansas city four/four and the velocity of celebration ;
The blues as dance music ;
Folk art and fine art ;
The blues as statement --
Blue devils of Nada : a contemporary American approach to aesthetic statement.
The intent of the artist (Regional particulars and universal implications) ;
Two all-American artists first-person singular (Duke Ellington vamping till ready ; Comping for Count Basie) ;
The Armstrong continuum (The twentieth-century American herald) ;
The Ellington synthesis (The vernacular imperative ; Storiella Americana as she is swyung, or, The blues as representative anecdote ; Armstrong and Ellington stomping the blues in Paris) ;
The visual equivalent to blues composition (Bearden plays Bearden) ;
The storyteller as blues singer (Ernest Hemingway swinging the blues and taking nothing) --
From the briarpatch file : on context, procedure, and American identity.
Antagonistic cooperation in Alabama ;
Context and definition ;
Academic lead sheet ;
Art as such ;
Riffing at Mrs. Jack's Place ;
Made in America : the achievement of Duke Ellington ;
Me and old Duke ;
Me and old Uncle Billy and the American mythosphere ;
The HNIC who he ;
Soul brothers abroad ;
Freedom bound U.S.A. ;
The good old boys down yonder ;
The "reconstruction" of Robert Penn Warren ;
Louis Armstrong in his own world ;
Manhattan in the twenties ;
The blue steel, rawhide, patent leather implications of fairy tales ;
An all-purpose, all-American literary intellectual --