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. Both, he argues, are virtuoso
performances that impart information, wisdom, and moral guidance to
their audiences; both place a high value on improvisation; and both
fiction and the blues create a delicate balance between the holy and the
obscene, essential human values and cosmic absurdity.
Encompassing artists from Ernest Hemingway to Duke Ellington, and from
Thomas Mann to Richard Wright*, The Hero and the Blues* pays homage to a
new black aesthetic.