The Hero and the Blues

Library Journal

Murray's 1973 book analyzes the connection between blues, literature, and the African American's place in society.

Sacred Fire

According to Murray in The Hero and the Blues, in literature "storybook images are indispensable to the basic human processes of world comprehension and self-definition.... the most delicately wrought short stories and the most elaborately textured novels, along with the homespun anecdotes, parables, fables, tales, legends, and sagas, are as strongly motivated by immediate educational objectives as are signs, labels... and directives. ... To make the telling more effective is to make the tale more to the point, more meaningful, and in consequence, if not coincidentally, more useful. Nor is the painter or the musician any less concerned than the writer with achieving a telling effect."

So begins Murray's three-part essay to writers, editors, educators, publishers, reviewers, and teachers, scolding them for having forgotten that "fiction of its very nature is most germane and useful not when it restricts itself to... social and political agitation and propaganda.., but when it performs the fundamental and universal functions of literature." Murray, an academician and historian, believed that literature established the context for social and political action. And that the writer, who created stories or narrated incidents that embodied aspects of human nature not only described them but also suggested possibilities thai could contribute most to people's welfare.

Calling on Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Marx Freud, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Count Basic, Duke Elling ton, and many others to support his premise, Murray's slim but sweeping narrative praises the artist, writer, and musician as soda commentator and educator, as long as he doesn't venture far from his storytelling roots.