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From Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy (1970), in The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream:

The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream

. . . In current social science usage,^[1] the concept of survival technique has somehow become confused with technology and restricted to matters of food, clothing, and shelter. (Incidentally the most transparent fallacy of all white norm/black deviation folklore is its exaggeration of the cultural implications of the control by white people of the production and distribution of the creature comforts required for subsistence in the Temperate Zone.) Human survival, however, involves much more than biological prolongation. The human organism must be nourished and secured against destruction, to be sure, but what makes man^[2] human is style. Hence the crucial significance of art in the study of human behavior: All human effort beyond the lowest level of the struggle for animal subsistence is motivated by the need to live in style.

Certainly the struggle for political and social liberty is nothing if not a quest for freedom to choose one’s own way or style of life. Moreover, it should be equally as obvious that there can be no such thing as human dignity and nobility without a consummate, definite style, pattern, or archetypal image. Economic interpretations of history notwithstanding, what activates revolutions is not destitution (which is most often leads only to petty thievery and the like) but intolerable systems and methods–intolerable styles of life. . . .

. . . As an art form, the blues idiom by its very nature goes beyond the objective of making human existence bearable physically or psychologically. The most elementary and hence the least dispensable objective of all serious artistic expression, whether aboriginal or sophisticated, is to make human existence meaningful. Man’s^[3] primary concern with life is to make it as significant as possible, and the blues are part of this effort.

— Albert Murray, The Blues Idiom and the Mainstream
In The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy (1970), pp. 54-55, 57.

1. ^[1][The opening section of the book is really fascinating. The argument in this section is also notable for its especially unrelenting hostility towards efforts (by social science technicians, etc.) to introduce quantitative social science findings into the public debate over social issues. There are some reasons why staking out this opposition was understandable, and productive, within the specific context of Murray’s argument and the rising strains of technocratic liberalism and neoconservatism within the public intellectualism in mid-late 1960s America. (You can see some similar strains of argument raising parallel concerns in something like young Noam Chomsky’s The Responsibility of Intellectuals, for example.) On the other hand, on the whole I think that nevertheless, on reflection, introducing quantitative social science findings into the public debate over social issues is often a pretty good idea, and the efforts to do this at the time deserved plenty of vigorous criticism but also a lot of attention and sympathy. —R.G.]↩
2. ^[2][Sic. —R.G.]↩
3. ^[3][Sic. —R.G.]↩