W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2004 The blues and jazz in Albert Murray's fiction: A study in the tradition of stylization Jacquelynne Jones Modeste College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Music Commons Recommended Citation Modeste, Jacquelynne Jones, "The blues and jazz in Albert Murray's fiction: A study in the tradition of stylization" (2004). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623458. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-fmd4-5n18 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE BLUES AND JAZZ IN ALBERT MURRAY’S FICTION: A STUDY IN THE TRADITION OF STYLIZATION A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the American Studies Program The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Jacquelynne Jones Modeste 2004 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPROVAL SHEET This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ie Jones Modeste Approved by the Committee, November 2004 acquqJ^n Y(McLendon, Chair Robert A. Gros: L{J . Bynn Weiss Robert (jJ o ’Meally, Professor Columbia University > 11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements iv Preface v Abstract vii Introduction: Academic Jam Session 2 Chapter I. The Making of a Hero 44 Chapter II. Slaying Modem Dragons 101 Chapter III. Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, Ralph Ellison—Point 145 Chapter IV. Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, Albert Murray—Counterpoint 179 Chapter V. (Un)Masking Possibilities: Bigger Thomas, Invisible Man and Scooter 210 Afterword 265 Bibliography 273 Vita 279 iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During this long and arduous process of earning the Ph.D. several people have, knowingly or not, helped me achieve academic success. Professor Jacquelyn Y. McLendon served as chair of my dissertation committee and worked diligently to see this process through to the end. I thank Professor McLendon for staying the course and for providing insightful critiques of my work. Professor Robert A. Gross, easily one of the smartest people I know, is also one of the best teachers I have had. His help in fine-tuning my ideas also helped broaden my discussion by allowing me to see connections beyond textual analysis. I thank Professor M. Lynn Weiss for providing me with critiques of my work that have, indeed, helped me write a stronger dissertation. Professor Robert G. O’Meally, an outside reader, provided me with ‘insider’ information about how to negotiate the dynamics of the Ph.D. process and live to tell about it. His advice in matters of diplomacy extends well beyond the dissertation process. I thank Professor O’Meally for his generosity in allowing me use of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University as I completed revisions for my dissertation. Professor Robin D.G. Kelley, renowned scholar and friend, has been a wellspring of inspiration providing me with intellectual, professional, and personal insights that have strengthened me immensely. Professor Kelley helped neutralize my angst during the most trying times of this process and I am sure success would not have been possible without him. Wynton Marsalis, talented musician and mentor, deepened my appreciation of jazz’s influence on one’s lived experiences in ways that helped my scholarship and broadened my perspective on life. I thank Albert Murray, Mozelle Murray and Michele Murray for the inordinate amount of time they spent teaching me about music, culture and all its related entities. I thank them for opening their home to me and making me feel like a member of the family. Like Scooter, I have benefited from “barbershop” sessions in which I practiced the skill of silence while honing the skill of listening.. .and I know when to keep my mouth shut. I thank my mom, a dreamer herself, for always listening to my ideas and for encouraging me to dream. I thank Lorenzo, Jose and Emilio for always ‘being there’ during this difficult process; they have allowed me to maintain a perspective on my professional endeavors that would not have been possible otherwise. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PREFACE Throughout the many meetings I have had with Albert Murray over the development of this project, he has consistently insisted on one thing: “Scooter [the recurring protagonist in Murray’s novels] is a hero.” Sometimes Murray declared this in a loud, raspy voice. Sometimes he stated it as a simple matter of fact. A few times the assertion resulted from his sheer exasperation when I seemed to be missing this point completely. Much to the chagrin of Mr. Murray, the whole idea of Scooter’s heroism seemed secondary to me. In each of Murray’s novels, Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, and The Seven League Boots and in the series as a whole, I wanted to explore Scooter’s personal development.11 wanted to gain insight into the process of artistic creation—particularly the use of the blues as a literary device—and to explore the cultural relevance of the blues in terms of its contribution to an American literary tradition. I believe the blues is instrumental in the formation of Scooter’s character. I knew that the blues heavily influenced the lives of many African Americans who used and sang the blues to explain life and express themselves, and enjoyed the blues just for its own sake, and I thought it logical that the blues as aesthetic statement would find its way into the fiction. Albert Murray was bom in Nokomis, Alabama, in 1916 but left this rural home at an early age and was reared by adoptive parents in Magazine Point, on the outskirts of the bustling port city of Mobile. Here Murray had exposure to the comings and goings of sailors who stopped over as their ships docked and the various languages they spoke and customs to which they adhered. Young Murray was exposed to an active nightlife, if not directly, through the businesses that comprised the entertainment and sustenance for sailors and area workers alike as they enjoyed visits to the city. A sawmill contributed to local industry. A train station, bus station and many other places helped Murray to imagine life beyond Mobile. Murray widened his environs first by attending Tuskegee Institute from 1935-39. Yet it was during his tenure as an Air Force officer from 1943-62 that Murray began to travel on a grand scale, taking full advantage of the opportunities to visit and/or live in California and abroad in Morocco, Italy, France, and Germany among other places. Murray met Ralph Ellison when both were undergraduates at Tuskegee but the two did not develop a close friendship until they were in New York (Murray moved to New York in 1962) pursuing writing careers. Married in 1941 to the beautiful Mozelle Menefee, also a Tuskegee graduate, the two have one daughter, Michele, an accomplished dancer. Murray has taught at the university level, written an autobiography of Count Basie, and has contributed several important books of non-fiction. He has published one book of poetry and to his Scooter series, comprised of the three books in this study, has just been added a fourth recently completed novel entitled The Magic Keys. As I began to study the scholarly work on the blues and explore my own interest in the music, I became intrigued with its central characteristic of improvisation. A seemingly effortless endeavor, a musician’s ability to improvise is actually the result of years of patience, practice, and dedication. The result is a deceptively spontaneous 1 Albert Murray, Train Whistle Guitar (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1974 ); The Spyglass Tree (N ew York: Pantheon , 1991); The Seven League Boots (New York: Vintage, 1995). V Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. musical creation that reflects a smoothness of style that transforms the original into a stylized statement of the artist’s personal interpretation. Each performance varies with each artist, within the repertoire of a single performer, and with each rendition of a particular tune. Such a display of individuality seemed untamable and I wondered how I could bring a sense of scholarly unity to something that was, in its very nature, diverse and elusive. I did not wish to write a history text on the blues, investigating the various aspects of individual performances and fill pages with great variety as I identified basic structural similarities. Neither did I want to write fiction, reveling in the emotive nature of the music and creating my own version of its guiding elements. Rather, I sought to merge these two endeavors, presenting a synthesis that is, like the music, based on the centrality of improvisation. As I worked toward this objective examining the blues and analyzing Scooter in terms of his blues rearing, I discovered the most amazing thing— Scooter is a hero because of the blues. vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT The use of the blues as a critical theory and as a literary model for the crafting of fiction opens new possibilities for both intellectual and artistic exploration.