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 League 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 that took place shortly after his second book, South to a Very Old Place, was published, and ending with a previously unpublished interview with the editor. 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. The collection reveals a man who enjoys a good time and a good conversation and whose intellectual improvisations move over such subjects as his reminiscences about the South he grew up in, his insights about regional culture, and commentaries about the contemporary American scene. He is quick to laugh, to conspire, to correct misperceptions, to mimic the sounds a great jazz musician makes, or to recite lines from favorite poems or novels. Taken together, these interviews reveal Murray to be the composite American he describes in his first book, The Omni-Americans, which, when published in 1970, announced a new and important literary voice. Roberta S. Maguire is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

In the final volume in the autobiographical adventures of Scooter, which include Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, and The Seven League Boots, Scooter, recently married and an NYU grad student, sets out to uncover the roots of his destined greatness, making his way through the colorful streets of Manhattan on a quest that leads him back to Alabama. Reprint.

The personal life story of the big-band jazz pianist and composer is recounted in a humorous style as if to a close friend and includes coverage of such musical classics as 'Jumpin' at the Woodside' and 'Cherokee.' Reissue. 10,000 first printing.

The renowned novelist, essayist, poet, and literary and social critic presents a collection of scholarly and provocative essays, reviews, and interviews that examine contemporary America, including his own beginnings as a writer, the accomplishments of Duke Ellington and William Faulkner, the responsibilites of the black educated elite, and the near-tragic, near-comic aura of the blues.

A sophisticated and diverse collection of poetry from the renowned novelist, essayist, and literary and social critic weaves together intellect and emotion with the influences of folk wisdom, jazz, American art, and the Gospel and gospel music.

A compelling assortment of personal letters captures a decade in the lifelong friendship of Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison, beginning in 1950 when Murray was a professor at Tuskegee Institute and Ellison was working on Invisible Man, and describes their mutual love of jazz, their writing careers, racial injustice, and their contemporaries--James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and others. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Set in 1920s Alabama, this novel follows the life of a young boy and the lessons he learns in school, at Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy's barbershop, and from Luzana Cholly, a gun-toting guitar player

A collection of essays on the blues and its impact on American culture includes such titles as 'The writer as artist,' 'Duke Ellington vamping till ready,' and 'Comping for Count Basie'

Accepting a position as a temporary bass player for a 1920s traveling band, Scooter, a recent Alabama college graduate, begins a cross-country tour from Harlem to Hollywood under the leadership of the Bossman

Hired straight out of college in the 1920s as a temporary bass player in the traveling band of a legendary jazz musician and composer, Scooter joins the group on a cross-country odyssey from Harlem to California. By the author of The Spyglass Tree.

Follows Scooter into young manhood at a Southern college during the 1930s as he discovers new friends, new ideas, and new ways to cope with the complexities of life