The writings of Albert Murray, who has died aged 97, expressed his impatience with the modern stereotype of the African American as victim. Murray was equally suspicious of the chic status sometimes bestowed on black people and black culture by mainstream white society. In fact, Murray, who did not publish his first book until he was 54, disliked even the frequently shifting terminology. "I am not African," he said. "I am an American." His word for the branch of culture that he represented and wrote about was "Negro", a preference shared by Murray's close friend the novelist Ralph Ellison.
That first book – the first in a profusion – was The Omni-Americans (1970), in which Murray staked his ground well apart from the current favourites of black intellectual life by criticising James Baldwin's transformation from artist to civil rights polemicist (the pair remained friends). He dedicated his energy to outlining ways in which "omni-American" culture and identity is dependent on the black presence.
To the fore in this analysis was music, the music of slaves and their descendants, through which vast numbers of New World citizens interpret their personal experience. Playing the blues, and responding to it, teaches the importance of improvisation – particularly in relation to black life which, to adapt the phrase of another of Murray's admirers, the drummer and writer Stanley Crouch, may be obliged to "invent its own structures as it goes along". But the lessons were universal. Murray proposed that some of the most vital and liberating chapters in the lives of Americans derived from the slave economy. What a dreadful place America would be without its music.
Murray's work was nourished by such paradoxes, as was that of his more famous friend Ellison. Both kept clear of civil rights platforms in the 1960s, and distanced themselves from the movement's later, noisier development, Black Power. The visibility of Murray as a writer suffered as a result of his discretion. Yet his writings prove that he was more at home in the labyrinth of Negro culture than the most "adamantly black" of his critics. His suggestion that the best of that culture could, if embraced open-mindedly, lead to creative changes in American political life seems to some extent to have come true with the election of Barack Obama.
Murray was born in Nokomis, Alabama, and grew up in a working-class household. At the age of 11 he discovered that his natural parents had given him up for adoption at birth. He was a successful athlete at Mobile County Training school but on entering the black university Tuskegee (founded by a former slave and a former slaveholder) he met Ellison and began a lifetime's immersion in literature and music.
The provincial trap of black separatism held no attraction for either man. André Malraux was one of Murray's literary models; another was William Faulkner. In music, he was a devotee of Duke Ellington, "the pre-eminent embodiment of the blues musician as artist", who achieved "the most comprehensive synthesis, extension and refinement to date of all the elements of blues musicianship". Murray's master of arts degree, to which he returned in 1946, after having served in the US Army Air Force during the second world war, was on Ernest Hemingway and TS Eliot. He continued his career in the military until his retirement as a major in 1962.
Ellison was at work on his novel Invisible Man in the 1940s, and the "ongoing literary dialogue" included sessions during which Murray "listened and responded to his readings of sequences and episodes". A collection of their correspondence between 1950 and 1960, published as Trading Twelves (2000), includes discussion of jazz, Harlem life and the literary scene. In the 1970s, Murray undertook to co-write the "autobiography" of Count Basie, an experience which he apparently did not enjoy. Good Morning Blues appeared in 1985, a year after Basie's death.
The most effective explication of Murray's ideas and understanding of black music is contained in Stomping the Blues (1976). Murray's other books included a sequence of four novels featuring his alter ego Scooter – Train Whistle Guitar (1974) and others – which gained a lukewarm critical reception (none has been published in the UK).
Murray died at his home in Harlem. He must have felt, up until his last days, that he was fated to be "African America's undiscovered national treasure", as one critic called him. In 1996, the National Book Critics Circle gave him its lifetime achievement award. He was honoured by his home state Alabama two years later, with the Harper Lee award.
At Tuskegee in the 1930s, Murray met Mozelle Menefee, whom he married in 1941. She and their daughter Michelle survive him.
• Albert Lee Murray, writer, born 12 May 1916; died 18 August 2013
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