Albert Murray

Rediscover the “most important book on black-white relationships” in America in a special 50th anniversary edition introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Walker Percy)
“The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people . . . Any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way...

"Albert Murray (1916-2013) was one of the most provocative and original American thinkers of the twentieth century, writing with equal grace and power as an essayist and novelist." --Page [4] of cover. Train whistle guitar: His schoolteacher, the barber, older girls, and a train-hopping musician teach Scooter just about all he needs to know in Gasoline Point, Alabama, during the 1920s. The spyglass tree: The growing up days of Scooter from boyhood...

"THE OMNI-AMERICANS is a book that takes its stand in direct opposition to much of the biographical, autobiographical, sociological, and fictional representations of U.S. Negro life that have emerged in the past decade - including such acclaimed works as Kenneth Clark's "Dark Ghetto", "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (the Moynihan Report)", and William Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner". With verve, wit, and keen intelligence Murray...

Jazz is born in New Orleans at the turn of the century emerging from several forms of music including ragtime, marching bands, work songs, spirituals, creole music, funeral parade music and above all, the blues. Musicians profiled here who advanced early jazz are Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Freddie Keppard, and musicians of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

In the mid 1930s, as the Great Depression refuses to lift, Benny Goodman finds himself hailed as the "King of Swing" and becomes the first white bandleader to hire black musicians. He has a host or rivals among them, Chick Webb, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmie Lunceford, Glen Miller and Artie Shaw. Louis Armstrong heads a big band of his own, while Duke Ellington continues his independent course, but great black artists still can't eat or sleep in many of the...