Joseph Sings the Blues

Albert Murray was an icon in the music industry. Though not a musician himself, he was a Black author whose writings shaped the genres of jazz and the blues. Between 1970 and 2005, he wrote a dozen books, including The Hero and the Blues (1973), Stomping the Blues (1976), From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity (2001), and The Magic Keys (2005), sparking crucial conversations on race, music, and culture in the United States. An Air Force veteran who was close friends with Invisible Man author Ralph Ellison, Murray co-founded Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York and was the inaugural recipient of the Harper Lee Award celebrating writers hailing from Alabama. He taught at colleges including Columbia, Barnard, Colgate, and Emory and was the recipient of two honorary doctorates. In a 1996 New Yorker profile, the Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. concluded: “This is Albert Murray’s century; we just live in it.”