Murray and Ellison on Blues, Memory, Embodiment, and the Origins of Tradition

This podcast is bookended by musical pieces by Arthur Cooper, Malaco Records recording artist and great grandfather of participant and University of Maryland doctoral student Timmy R. Bridgeman.

A conversation about Albert Murray's The Hero and the Blues and two essays by Ralph Ellison, "Living with Music" and "Blues People." In this discussion, we explore the relation between Murray's and Ellison's development of blues as a form of thought, life, and expressive culture and ideas of tradition. With particular emphasis on and extension of blues and jazz as "idea emotions" (Ellison), we link their work to ideas of tradition, orality, invention, selfhood, and the relation between the bold or strong musician and their predecessors - articulating a relation of working with rather than, as with Harold Bloom, a parricidal impulse in relation to precursors. We also explore how blues, jazz, and the African American intellectual tradition reconfigures transcendence and ecstasy to locate intellectual-tradition work inside the body and inside the club, akin to the vision of poetry developed by Barbara Christian, which renders a very different sense of memory, history, and world than we find in the pessimistic work of Martin Heidegger.

Participants: Katelin Ten, John E. Drabinski, Shannon Neal, and Timmy R. Bridgeman.