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Very Old Place, was published, and ending with a previously unpublished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
