In this visionary book, Murray takes an audacious new look at black music and, in the process, succeeds in changing the way one reads literature. Murray's subject is the previously unacknowledged kinship between fiction and the blues. Both, he argues, are virtuoso performances that impart information, wisdom, and moral guidance to their audiences; both place a high value on improvisation; and both fiction and the blues create a delicate balance between the holy and the obscene, essential human values and cosmic absurdity.
Encompassing artists from Ernest Hemingway to Duke Ellington, and from Thomas Mann to Richard Wright, The Hero and the Blues pays homage to a new black aesthetic.
- ISBN10 1299049036
- ISBN13 9781299049031
- Publish Date 1 January 2012 (first published December 1973)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 25 February 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Vintage
- Format eBook
- Language English