In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Cosmos Murray 61 train supplies continuity in the ongoing heroic confrontation with harsh actualities . In Stomping the Blues and The Blue Devils of Nada Murray elaborates on the train’s significance to the northbound and upwardly mobile movement of black people during the great migration. The train was an awesome beacon , impossible to ignore as it snaked through every southern burg, tantalizing would-be heroes into forward movement and hope. Not only did its metaphorical weight hearken back to the underground railroad, but its driving , moaning sound, which is onomatopoetically re-created in folk blues, informed the aesthetic imagination fueling American music from the turn of the century through the heyday of Duke Ellington and, I would add, on through the birth and persistence of rock and roll. InAmerican music, one can hear the onomatopoeia of the train reverberating back to the puffing steam engines and forward through the sounds of theA train barreling through New York City. Murray writes, once was the north star then it was the L and N not talking about cincinnati not telling nobody where or when and going down to the railroad down to the railroad track grab me an arm full of freight train ain’t never ever coming back. (“Epic Exits” 5–6) The speaker of “Epic Exits” rides the wave of possibility provided by the blues-drenched American soundtrack. The narrator’s story is a “horatioalgerism” much like that told by BookerT. Washington in Up from Slavery. It is also Albert Murray’s story. It is a bildungsroman following the development of a young man who is well aware of ­ America’s dark past; so he enters into a heroic and aesthetic confronta- Baker 62 tion with it. For example, the speaker hears the sawmill whistles calling him and the other members of his community to their menial jobs, but he rejects them and listens instead to the school bell ringing: early in the morning hear the sawmill whistles blow then when the school bells ring it’s my time to be ready to go and When folks called me schoolboy I never would deny my name I said you’ve got to be a schoolboy if preparation is your aim. (7–8) Then, as Murray told me, he refers specifically to Tuskegee in the poem,­ saying early in the morning listening to the radio first week on the campus four chime time years to go. (9) and then specifically to his wife, Mozelle, anotherTuskegee graduate, I said what I said and her smile said we shall see ain’t no line of jive gonna ever make a fool of me. (11) Murray has said, “You write about what you know about. Try to get how you really feel about it. If your sensibility is comprehensive enough and your craft is good enough, then what you come out with is probably a represen­ Cosmos Murray 63 tative anecdote. . . . the problem of the artist is to take . . . idiomatic particu­ lars and process them in a way that gives them universal impact” (qtd. in Wood 101–2), and in so doing, fulfill the vernacular imperative. He uses the word “imperative” very much like the word “obligation” because in ­ Cosmos Murray the artist has a social commitment “to human well-being and self-­ realization” (Hero 26). In this regard, Murray’s sense of obligation is akin to a spiritual commitment with both existential and religious overtones. As John Callahan puts it, Murray and Ellison were doing “the Lord’s work,” and for them, “the Lord’s work” is to create art that, like the blues, functions as an “existential device or vehicle for coping with the ever-changing fortunes of human existence” (Murray, From the Briarpatch File 5). In The Blue Devils of Nada, Murray refers to the pantheon of great Ameri­ can art (into which he inducts the works of Duke Ellington) as a metaphori­ cal temple: “it refers to all of the gods, heroes, outstanding champions and achievers of a particular people or nation” (76) into which artists must earn their way “as gods and heroes have always had to do” (77). Artists fulfill their obligations and earn their way into the pantheon by tapping into human experience and realizing the universal implications of specific situations, knowing and engaging all of the formal artistic traditions through which experi­ ence has been stylized into enduring art forms, and devising tactics that extend these traditions by contextualizing them within vernacular communication that encompasses the...

Share