Scholar and poet Kevin Young's first major work of nonfiction, The Grey Album, is a personal, scholarly, far-reaching and innovative study of the role of "storying" in American culture, particularly African-American culture.
The art of "storying," as Young describes the tradition of "black imagination conduct[ing] its escape by way of underground railroads of meaning," is central to the literature and music of an American black population struggling out of slavery, segregation and racism. It involves creating a "counterfeit" identity--switching names and nicknames ("Hell, look how many names Diddy has had in the relatively short time he has been on the scene") and crafting languages (slave work chants, gospel shouts, oral poetry, blues mumbling, jazz scat, soul "fa-fa-fa-fa-fa," hip-hop profanity, DJ scratch).
Langston Hughes, Frederick Douglass, Gwendolyn Brooks and Ralph Ellison share the spotlight with relatively obscure people like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Bob Kaufman. Young pulls readers deep into the music of everyone from Bird and Miles to Otis and Aretha, up to Wu-Tang and Danger Mouse (whose mashup of Jay-Z's Black Album with the Beatles White Album inspired Young's title). Even Muhammad Ali's bobbing and weaving "rope-a-dope" strategy and his "sting like a bee" poetry are part of the storying tradition.
The pleasures in The Grey Album, however, are not just those of learning erudite details of black American history, but also those of hearing the impassioned impressions of a poet diving deep into his own personal history. Young entertains as much as he teaches and broadens our understanding of the unifying threads of the country's cultural traditions. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.