Product Description: 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...read more

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.

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. (view table of contents)

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. (view table of contents)

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.

(view table of contents)

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

Product Description: Published to accompany a travelling exhibition of his work, this volume is devoted to the photomontages of Romare Bearden (1914-1988), and considers their relation both to the rest of his oeuvre and to African-American art and culture...read more

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.

Product Description: In this visionary book, Murray takes an audacious new look at black music and, in the process, succeeds in changing the way one reads literature. Murray's subject is the previously unacknowledged kinship between fiction and the blues...read more

Product Description: The highly acclaimed novelist and biographer Albert Murray tells his classic memoir of growing up in Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s in South to a Very Old Place. Intermingling remembrances of youth with engaging conversation, African-American folklore, and astute cultural criticism, it is at once an intimate personal journey and an incisive social history, informed by “the poet’s language, the novelist’s sensibility, the essayist’s clarity, the jazzman’s imagination, the gospel singer's depth of feeling” (The New Yorker)...read more

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

Product Description: The Omni-Americans is a classic collection of wickedly incisive essays, commentaries, and reviews on politics, literature, and music. Provocative and compelling, Albert Murray debunks the "so-called findings and all-too-inclusive extrapolations of social science survey technicians," contending that "human nature is no less complex and fascinating for being encased in dark skin...read more

Product Description: This study of the blues by one of America's premier essayists and novelists will change old attitudes about a tradition that continues to feed the very heart of popular music—a blues that dances, shakes, shimmies, and exchanges bad news for stomping, rollicking, pulse-quickening good times...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)