Sun Ra said he came from Saturn, and he played like it
Herman Blount of Birmingham, Alabama, spent most of his life insisting that any name other than Ra was a pseudonym. As Sun Ra, a self-declared visitor from Saturn preaching peace, he led a costumed big band through free improvisation and early synthesizers, and became a founding figure of Afrofuturism.
Born on May 22, 1914, he was named after Black Herman, a vaudeville magician who had dazzled his mother. For decades nobody outside his circle knew even that much, because he dodged personal questions and gave birth years anywhere from 1910 to 1918; his biographer John Szwed finally pinned the date down in a 1997 book. As a boy he was composing and sight reading by 11 or 12, and as a teenager he would reportedly hear a big band and write out its whole set from memory. The library of the Black Masonic Lodge, one of the few in Birmingham open to African Americans, fed him esoteric books that shaped his later thinking.
His first full-time job, in 1934, came from his former biology teacher Ethel Harper, who hired him for her touring band; when she left mid-tour, he took charge and renamed it the Sonny Blount Orchestra. A scholarship to Alabama A&M in 1936 lasted a year. He claimed that around then a bright light carried him to Saturn, where beings with antennae over their eyes and ears told him to quit school and speak to the world through music. Szwed notes his closest associates cannot trace the tale earlier than 1952, but Ra repeated it unchanged for the rest of his life.
Drafted in October 1942, he declared himself a conscientious objector, argued with the judge over law and scripture, spent weeks in an Alabama jail, and was eventually sent to do forestry work in Pennsylvania, playing piano at night. By the late 1940s he was in Chicago, and from the mid-1950s he led the Arkestra, whose dancers and players wore costumes mixing ancient Egypt with the Space Age.
The output is staggering: over 100 full-length albums and well over 1,000 songs, ranging from ragtime echoes to bebop, fusion and ensembles of more than 30 musicians. Illness forced him to retire in 1992, and he died on May 30, 1993. Under his longtime saxophonist Marshall Allen, the band was still touring as of 2026.
Source: Sun Ra
