A Call to Assembly : The Autobiography of a Musical Storyteller

Music and learning ("Can't nobody take nothin from outta your head," said his first mentor, Daddy Long) set the course of Willie Ruff's life. He sopped up music and learning when he joined the army at age fourteen, coming under the influence of various fatherly music masters. While he was an undergraduate at Yale, it was Paul Hindemith's magnetic presence that expanded Willie's musical horizons. Later, playing the French horn with the Lionel Hampton band and forming the "Duo" with his old piano-playing army sidekick, Dwike Mitchell, Willie learned firsthand from powerful influence like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie. And through his years at Yale as a professor of music, the quest for learning never stopped.

But music wasn't all. A powerfully recurring theme of A Call to Assembly comes from Willie's curiosity about the black soldier in American history. It began when he was in grade school and witnessed an air show by an all-black squadron of fighter pilots from Tuskegee. Later, in the army, Willie met some of those pilots who had fought over Germany and Italy and risked courts-martial to gain the same rights white officers enjoyed. Years later, through a set of extraordinary circumstances, he came across a statement written in 1902 by another Alabama neighbor, an ex-Confederate general who commended the valor of Negro soldiers fighting in the Spanish-American War. It was, Willie writes, as if this general "laid a hand on me from the grave and gave me pride and understanding."

Willie Ruff's is an exhilarating story, told in a distinctive voice that rings clear and true, smart and funny, and is always moving.