The Omni-Americans

“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 or another.” These words, written by Albert Murray at the height of the Black Power movement, cut against the grain of their moment, and announced the arrival of a major new force in American letters. Reviewing Murray’s groundbreaking first book The Omni-Americans in 1970, Walker Percy called it “the most important book on black-white relationships . . . indeed on American culture . . . published in this generation.”

Murray’s singular poetic voice, impassioned argument, and pluralistic vision are perhaps more relevant today than ever before. For Murray’s centennial, editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin have assembled the definitive edition of his collected nonfiction, including The Omni-Americans and the five brilliant books that followed. The memoir South to a Very Old Place (1971) recounts the author’s return, in his mid-fifties, to the people and places of his Alabama youth, weaving personal encounters with several Southern writers into a richly textured report on the newly integrated South. The Hero and the Blues (1973) is a series of lectures on the trickster-hero figure in world literature and its relation to musical improvisation. Stomping the Blues (1976), a masterpiece of music criticism and perhaps Murray’s most influential work, outlines a history and aesthetics of jazz and the blues that, in the 1980s, became the foundation for programming at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the “House of Swing” that Murray did so much to establish as a founding board member.

The essay collections The Blue Devils of Nada (1996) and From the Briarpatch File (2001) enlarge upon the themes of his previous books, focusing on individual American writers, artists, and musicians. For an out-chorus, Gates and Devlin present eight previously uncollected pieces, early and late, on topics ranging from the Civil Rights movement to the definition and use of such American words as soul, stone, and jazz.