Sun Ra, The Alien from Birmingham

Herman Blount was born in Birmingham on May twenty-second, nineteen fourteen, and grew up to become one of the most singular figures in American music. He accomplished this by leaving Birmingham entirely and eventually claiming he had not been born on earth at all.

As a child, Blount was given the nickname Sonny, and he displayed a musical talent that his teachers described as exceptional even when he was young. By eleven or twelve he was composing original music and sight-reading anything put in front of him. By his mid-teens he was performing semi-professionally with jazz and rhythm-and-blues groups around the city, attending performances by Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Fats Waller when they came through Birmingham on tour. He studied formally under Fess Wheatley, a noted local music teacher.

He enrolled at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College, then drifted toward Chicago in the late nineteen forties, where he became involved in the city's jazz scene. Somewhere in that period, he abandoned the name Herman Blount and the identity that came with it. He called himself Le Sony'r Ra, shortened to Sun Ra, named for the Egyptian sun god. He claimed, in interviews and liner notes and on stage for decades, that he had not come from Birmingham but from Saturn, that he was on a mission of peace to earth, and that his music was the means of delivering that mission.

The claim was performance and philosophy at once. His actual music, which spanned free jazz, swing, electronic experimentation, and pure noise, depending on the night and the ensemble, was impossible to categorize. The Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, in the city where Herman Blount learned to play, counts him among its honorees.