Music Monday: Sun Ra in Birmingham

I’ve just returned home from a 5000+ mile road trip through the heart of COVID country. We hit 17 states: ND, SD, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, WVa, Va, NC, SC, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee. 

Since we swung through Alabama, this meant a stop in Birmingham to see the final resting place of Sun Ra’s earthly remains. As William Sites has expertly noted, Birmingham exerted a formative influence over Sun Ra’s career and identity. Born in the city as Herman Sonny Blount, he graduated from Birmingham’s Black industrial high school which by the 1930s was the largest Black high school in the US. There he not only honed his abilities as a musician but also developed his life-long appreciation of discipline which he passed along to his band, the Arkestra, through his famous day-long rehearsal sessions.

In some sense, Birmingham was the capital of Alabama’s “Black Belt” despite its location in the state’s Piedmont region and its industrializing economic in the late-19th and early-20th century provided an alternative to agricultural work organized around sharecropping. In this way, movement to the city anticipated the “Great Migration,” and Birmingham’s urban blacks often found it easier to find work in northern cities. Thus, Sun Ra’s move to Chicago in the 1940s followed a well-trod path for Black residents of Birmingham. 

From his early life in Alabama, he carried with him not only his interest in discipline, but also his deep interest in Afrocentric views of Black history fostered through his likely contact with Black masons in the city’s Moorish Science Temple and his brief time at Alabama A&M near Huntsville where he likely encountered the work of George G.M. James and that institutions founding president, William Hooper Councill. In Alabama, he also claimed to have experienced his alien abduction which crystalized his special mission to elevate human existence through his music. That said, he talked very little of his own life, influences, and upbringing in his interviews, and in the case of his alien abduction, his story seems to have changed a bit with each telling.

For an intellectual famously ambivalent about his childhood, then, it is a bit surprising to discover that he returned to Birmingham at the end of his life and was buried there. Ever the performer, perhaps, Ra sought to bring a sense of symmetry to his earthly existence. His travels throughout the world and the galaxy led his band and his listeners along the great parabola that forms a rocket’s path which in the end, brings traveler back toward where they started (even if it’s not the same, exactly place). 

We visited Sonny’s earthly resting place on a Sunday morning about an hour after Sun rise. 

As a brief aside, his grave is surrounded by the graves of Birmingham’s Greek community in the city’s Elmwood cemetery.