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" When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man. "

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" The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people. It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people. "

Albert Murray

Blues

Product

Creation

" The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed. "

" The United States is not a nation of black and white people. Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. "

" A jazz tune, melody, or composition is usually based on either a traditional twelve-bar, eight-bar, or four-bar blues chorus or on the thirty-two-bar chorus of the American popular song. "

" As any competent student of literary composition knows, the more natural and casual a voice sounds in print, the more likely it is to have been edited time and again. "

" Now, one can often get away with playing music by ear when it is not being recorded, but writing is another matter; its mistakes are not forgotten because they are still there to confuse us. "

" The juke joint, the honky tonk, and the ballroom also represent one more thing, anthropologically speaking: a ceremonial context for the male-with-female-duet dance flirtation and embrace, upon which the zoological survival of the human species has always been predicated. "

" Effective stream-of-consciousness narration is the product of verbal precision, not just of literal documentation. It is decidedly not a matter of unedited free-association. "

" I am not an African. I am an American. "

Albert Murray

I Am

African

" If it is properly done, the 'as told to' autobiography represents how the subject wants his story told. "