Sun Ra: From Birmingham to Saturn

Herman Poole Blount was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May twenty-second, nineteen fourteen, and grew up in a city where the terms of Black life were organized by law, custom, and enforced violence into a system of near-total restriction. He was a musical prodigy. He was also, at some point in his young adulthood, working through a philosophical problem that Jim Crow Alabama presented with particular clarity: how do you imagine yourself free in a society whose entire architecture is designed to tell you that you are not?

His answer was radical. He would not be from Alabama. He would not be from Earth. He renamed himself Sun Ra and declared that he was from Saturn, sent to Earth on a mission to spread peace through music. He denied having been born. He gave evasive and contradictory answers when pressed about his personal history. He constructed, with great care and consistency over several decades, a complete alternative cosmology in which he was an ambassador from somewhere else entirely.

By the nineteen fifties he was in Chicago leading the Arkestra, a large ensemble playing some of the most formally experimental jazz being produced anywhere in America. Electronic instruments, synthesizers, collective improvisation, theatrical costumes and staging: Sun Ra was doing all of this before it had a name. He recorded prolifically on his own label, played everywhere from small clubs to concert halls, and never once dropped the cosmic persona.

Scholars who have written about Sun Ra over the past several decades have generally read the Saturn mythology as a systematic philosophical response to the specific conditions of Black life in Jim Crow Alabama, a willed displacement from an Earth that had made displacement the condition of being Black in America. He had to imagine himself somewhere else before somewhere else would let him exist.

He died in Birmingham on May thirtieth, nineteen ninety-three. He had come home.