The Hero And the Blues

"[Albert Murray] is possessed of the poet’s language, the novelist’s sensibility, the essayist’s clarity, the jazzman’s Imagination, the gospel singer’s depth of feeling."

— The New Yorker

In this visionary book, the author of the legendary Stomping the Blues takes an audacious new look at black music and, in the process, succeeds in changing the way we read all literature. Albert 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 is at once an homage and a manifesto for a new black aesthetic. Erudite, eloquent, appreciative, and iconoclastic, it is further evidence of Murray’s ability to turn the essay into a kind of poetry — as enchanting as it is instructive.

"The size of his reputation is incommensurate with his quality …. Murray is as close to a classic nineteenth-century man of letters as one might find in this country today."

— Boston Globe