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Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (McGraw-Hill, 1976) Reissued in paperback by DeCapo Press, 1989. With the 1976 publication of Stomping the Blues, Albert Murray sealed his reputation as one of the preeminent chroniclers of the blues. The book gives the impression that Murray not only understands the technical details of this American art form, but also understands its physical power – the pain and anguish, the joy and exhilaration – experienced by blues musicians and blues-lovers. Murray writes as someone who knows the blues like he knows his own family idiosyncrasies. In fact, Stomping the Blues reads more like a detailed scrapbook than a historical record of blues history, with several pages devoted to black-and-white photos of musicians, dancehalls, and old phonograph records. Murray writes in an incantatory language, rather than the stilted language of a sociologist. He seems to have lived and contemplated the blues for a lifetime, finally pouring his feelings and memories of the blues onto the page to help succeeding generations understand the music and the people who made it. Included in this scrapbook are the names and faces familiar to contemporary listeners - James Brown, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, and Robert Johnson. But the best sections read like recollections of days long gone – the days of strolling guitar pickers and harmonica players, a time of "old downhome ragtime and barrelhouse piano players," honky-tonk, jook joints, the days when Ma Rainey, Jelly Roll Morton, Leadbelly, and Bessie Smith earned a level of fame never before enjoyed by African-American artists. Murray's blues, whether sweet or hot, do not fit the textbook definition of the time, that the blues consisted of sad or gloomy music. It's true that much of the lyrical emphasis of the blues centers on love gained or lost. However, the blues is happy music that gets people dancing, whether in the dancehall or concert hall. "Indeed," Murray writes, "the impression of honky-tonk dancing that downhome churchfolk have given over the years is that it amounts to the breaking of all the Ten Commandments together." This is Albert Murray's blues, a musical record, so to speak, of the "texture and vitality of American life" converted, as Murray writes, into "first-rate universally appealing music." MORE: Albert Murray interviewed on Jerry Jazz Musician website A selection of Albert Murray’s favorite jazz recordings Tuskegee University Tribute to Albert Murray, 2003 An Article by Murray in The Nation – "Ellington Hits 100" |
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