Reviewing Sun Ra (Part 2)

Yesterday, I began to work on a little review essay that considers some of recent work on Sun Ra including last year’s Arkestra album Swirling, the re-release of Sun Ra’s 1979 classic Languidity, and the recordings from the Arkestra’s 1971 tour of Egypt. Today, I turn to William Sites’ book Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (Chicago 2020) as a way to give some background to Sun Ra’s career and personal philosophy and set it against the backdrop of mid-century American urbanism and the Black experience.  

Sun Ra’s legacy, in many ways, is split between his idiosyncratic, larger-than-life personality and his music. Born Herman Blount, he changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra in the 1940s when he moved from Birmingham, Alabama to Chicago. William Sites’ book Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City(Chicago 2020) traces Herman Blount’s journey from the steel town of Birmingham to Chicago. Sites suggested that Blout’s upbringing and early career in Birmingham provided one key for understanding his later development as a musician and thinkers. In that city, Blount developed musical discipline at the city’s industrial high school designed, in part, to prepare Black youth for jobs in Birmingham’s industrial sector. From these encounters Blount developed his famous commitment to discipline which shape the expectations that he had for his musicians. It also instilled within him a commitment to personal betterment and advancement that was consistent with efforts in the Black community to leverage industrialization as a way to develop social, economic, and political power.

During his time in Alabama, he also had his first encounters with Afrocentric thought. Sites notes that Birmingham had Moorish Science Temple with its connections to the Masons and its distinctive blend of Afrocentric mysticism and Near Eastern lore. After high school Blount briefly attended Alabama A&M, whose founder and longtime president, William Hooper Councill (1848–1909), composed several tracts tracing the history of the Black race during his time as president of the institution. Bount’s time there may have overlapped with the Guyanese writer George G. M. James, whose Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (1935) was a rather widely circulated Afrocentric text that appeared in Sun Ra’s personal library.

It is also during his time at Alabama A&M that he was abducted by aliens and experienced an epiphany. While the exact details of his abduction remain unclear, it appears that his encounter confirmed in his own mind that he was set apart for special things. In some accounts, this encounter make him recognize that he is from outer space. Whatever the precise details of this event, it transformed Blount’s view of himself and it shaped his musical identity as well.

By the time he relocated to Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood in the late 1940s, he had has begun to develop his interest in an Afrocentric view of the world which he ultimately melded with his distinctive form of Afrofuturism. In collaboration with Alton Abraham his longtime business partner with whom he co-founded Saturn Records, Sun Ra developed the Thmei Institute. This loosely organized group of intellectuals published a series of partly mystical and partly historical broadsheets that blended theosophy, Egyptology, numerology, Christianity, and philosophy. These works set out a path for enlightenment and liberation for Black people by appealing not only to the potential of an expanded spiritual life which often drew on mystical readings of the Bible, but also to various stripes of pan-Africanism and more conventional Garveyite overtones. 

Sites argued that Sun Ra’s philosophy in the 1950s and early 1960s developed in the spatial context of post-war Bronzeville, Chicago. Concepts of urbanism changed in the post-war period as white cities increasing viewed with suspicion the growth of a prosperous and independent Black communities of the interwar period. At the same time, an increasingly disillusioned Black population realized that the promises of post-war prosperity and expanded rights grounded in the shared sacrifice of military service would not be forthcoming. In fact, Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s was characterized by aggressive efforts to limit the expansion of Black neighborhoods, through urban renewal projects that often targeted low-cost housing and Black businesses. This complemented the growth of new ideas and expectations of middle class life anchored in a rapidly developing halo of suburbs. For Sites, the growing discontent played out in Washington Park where various groups, from the Nation of Islam to Sun Ra’s Thmei collective, offered new visions of a Black future as well as new perspectives on the Black past.

Swirling draws heavily on Sun Ra’s legacy as an Afrofuturist thinker highlighting his vision of the future more than a vision of a Black past. Sites connects “Rocket No. 9” with a series of pieces that traces the route of a futuristic version of Chicago’s elevated railway across an interplanetary landscape (Sites 198-199). The call “Rocket No. 9 take off for the planet Venus” mimics the departure call of a future shuttle complete with departure tones that would sound appropriate on a modern subway. The version of the song recorded toward the end of Sun Ra’s time in Chicago included a final verse with the chant “The second stop is Jupiter” that further reinforces the connection between the rocket and a railway. Sites suggests that these pieces superimpose intergalactic imagery on the expanding suburban landscape of Chicago with the El taking Black riders not just out of the increasingly circumscribed Black neighborhoods but outward toward the newly emerging middle class suburbs. The absence of the final verse in the most recent arrangement of the piece perhaps reflects a bit of pessimism in the current situation and circumscribes some of limitlessness of the outer space and perhaps the aspirations for a contemporary Black middle class.