All Voice

Train Whistle Guitar from Albert Murray: Collected Novels & Poems Library of America pp. 1-141.

The Spyglass Tree from Albert Murray: Collected Novels & Poems Library of America pp. 141-309.

Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as told to Albert Murray.  Random House.  399 pp.

I haven’t posted in some time for a variety of reasons: I’ve been working on a novel, which I have now “finished” on three separate occasions; I’ve been doing various things to prepare for the publication of my sixth novel, Hank Heals, in early October, and I’ve been re-thinking my website, which I haven’t changed since I began it in 2015.  I’m planning to focus it more on my published work, especially this new novel, but I’ll definitely retain some form of the Evening Mind section, the blog where I post about books, movies, and other interests (I haven’t been to a movie since the pandemic began, except for the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts.  But we watch on streaming).  I miss writing here when I don’t do it, and I’m glad to be back.

And I haven’t stopped reading in the evening (which is why this part of the website is called Evening Mind), or even slowed down much.  Though I don’t buy as many books as I used to, I have trouble resisting the sales that sometimes show up at the Library of America.  If you buy books from them on a semi-regular basis, they let you know about sales.  And you get some great bargains, which was how I happened to acquire the fiction of Albert Murray, which I’d been wanting to look into for years.

Murray had a fascinating career.  He had literary ambitions as far back as his days at Tuskegee Institute, where he was taking works of literature from the library and noticed that many of them had also been checked out by one of his fellow undergraduates, Ralph Ellison.  The two men became friends (and their correspondence is amazing, as collected in Ellison’s letters).  In his early twenties, Murray began a long novel that would have covered the ground of both of these novels, Train Whistle Guitar, about his youth growing up in Alabama, and The Spyglass Tree, about his time at Tuskegee.  But various practical matters intervened, including a career in the Air Force, and he didn’t finish them at the time.

In his early forties he developed some kind of heart condition, which enabled him to retire from his Air Force career.  (Apparently it was serious, but he took care of himself after that and lived to be 97.)  He and his wife retired to New York, where they occupied an apartment in Harlem, and he took up his literary career in earnest.  For years he was known primarily as a social critic, with books like The Omni-Americans, and as a music critic, author of Stomping the Blues and other books on the subject.  But he finally got back to fiction, and published his first novel, Train Whistle Guitar, the year he turned 58.  It was well-received, and he began a sequel, The Spyglass Tree, but various other projects intervened—most notably the Autobiography of Count Basie—and he didn’t finish and publish the book until 1991, when he was 75.  He published his third novel at the age of 79, and his fourth at 89.  He had a major literary career at an age when most men are retired.

To say the very least, Murray did not have the mentality of a victim.  In some ways his whole literary career seemed to stem from his reading of The Moynihan Report in 1965, which was pro-African American but often spoke of them as victims.  Murray’s response, in his introduction to The Omni-Americans, was to say, “Someone must at least begin to try to do justice to what U.S. Negroes like about being black and to what they like about being Americans. . . . far from simply struggling in despair, they live with gusto and a sense of elegance that has always been downright enviable.”[1]

In his first two novels, it’s as if Murray has set out to show us that gusto and sense of elegance.  They read like the nostalgic memoirs of a person looking back on an idyllic time (is that your impression of black life in Alabama in the twenties and thirties?).  There’s a certain Huck Finnish quality, especially to the first book.  And just like Huck, Murray’s narrator Scooter is nobody’s fool.  He understand his situation in a segregated Alabama; he just knows how to work the system.  Also like Huck, he has an absolutely captivating voice, if it’s a trifle more obscene than Huck’s (I suspect Huck would have been obscene too if the times had allowed it).  I could honestly quote almost any paragraph in the book as an illustration.  Here Scooter, or somebody, is talking about a young black man who was having a romance with a wealthy white widow woman.

“Boy, miss Jessica Butterfield don’t count because she is one in a minnion.  She can do anything she wants because she can buy every peckerwood in Tucker’s Quarters.  Buy them and bale them.  Boy it’s them others you got to worry about.  Because just remember when they start looking at you they can holler rape if you don’t and if you do you can be damn sure that’s what they going to holler if you get caught.  And they’ll know she lying and come after you just the same.  Boy, Miss Jessica Butterfield hid her sweet nigger out, give him his get-away money and walked down the middle of the goddamn street with a goddamn silk poker dot umbrella and don’t even have to think about daring a single one of them bad-assed peckerwoods to even whisper.  Boy that’s one widow woman can lift her little pink ring finger and shut down half this town and starve every peckerwood in sight.”

I’m a sucker for voice and verbal inventiveness, and Murray spins two novels out of those two things alone.  You could argue that not a lot happens (though there’s a fair amount of sex; has anyone mentioned that Albert Murray must be one of the best-looking writers who ever lived?), but a reader like me doesn’t care, because he’s so enamored of the telling.  These book are eye opening about a culture that white Americans often don’t understand or know much about.  But as I’ve said before, I’d rather learn about it through narratives—fiction or memoir—than through nonfiction that lectures or hectors me.

The same thing goes for Count Basie’s autobiography, which I read when it first came out and have been dipping into again.  Murray has an amazing talent for capturing voice; Count Basie doesn’t talk like Scooter, and didn’t grow up in the deep South (but in Red Bank, New Jersey).  But he talks like himself, and does so through all 385 pages of text.  Murray doesn’t intrude at all (except when he occasionally adds something to what Basie said, or corrects him on a detail).  Murray joked somewhere that for the seven years he worked on this book, when he said I, he meant Count Basie.  He more or less became Basie in writing this book, which was finished, but not published, when Basie died in 1984.

The story is fascinating.  As a boy Basie wasn’t so much interested in jazz, or in music, as in show business itself; he wanted to be in show business one way or other.  He was a terrible student at school, flunked several grades, and eventually dropped out, not because he was stupid, but because he had no interest in what was happening.  He had studied piano as a young child, and though he was never adept at reading music, he could pretty much play a tune if he heard it once, and could improvise when he needed to.  His first “gig” as a musician came when he was helping out at the local movie theater, doing odd jobs, and one day the woman who accompanied films on the piano didn’t show up.  Basie told the boss he could do the piano part and the man didn’t even listen, just told him to do his job.  But before the movie began the young man went down and sat at the piano, and did so well that the boss fired the woman and hired him.  His career in show business was launched.

Count Basie must be the most modest great artist who ever lived.  To hear him tell it, every piano player he ever encountered was better than he, and every arranger he worked with did most of the work himself, while Basie himself snuck off and had a few nips.  Yet Basie’s orchestra was one of the most recognizable in American jazz, and had a sound like no other.  His autobiography is casual and anecdotal, and wore me out on a second reading by recounting one gig after another, though the first time I read through the whole book avidly.  I recommend it to anyone interested in American jazz.

The book is somehow both Basie and Murray.  It’s Basie’s voice, and he obviously told the stories, but someone arranged them to form a coherent narrative.  And that someone had an amazing ability to mimic the other man.  Murray had a remarkable career, and this book—though he originally didn’t want to do it—was a major part of it.  I have a feeling it influenced his subsequent career.  The first two Scooter novels sound a lot like the life of Albert Murray, but in the third he becomes a touring jazz musician.

[1] He would echo such sentiments later in the book (the italics are his): “And if black people have such low self-regard, why they hell are they forever laughing at everybody else?  How come as soon as they get something desegregated so many of them feel so at home that they subject to try to take it over by sheer bullshit (which they would never try in an all-black situation)?  How come they’re forever talking as if superstars like Willie Mays, Jim Brown, Oscar Robertson, and even Leontyne Price come a dime a dozen in the black community.  And if they really feel so stupid, how come a third-rate Harlem hipster is always so certain he got him a square as soon as he spots an Ivy League white boy in a non-academic situation.”