1

ALIEN

He came from Saturn. Arrival date: May 22, 1914. Place: the Magic City, Birmingham, Alabama. Terrestrial identity: Herman Poole Blount, the apparent son of Cary and Ida, who had moved to Birmingham from Demopolis, a one-time French utopian community.1 They started a family, adding a girl and two boys to Cary’s son from an earlier marriage, but their hopes for happiness together flagged, and before long, Cary and Ida separated. Ida and the children moved in with her mother and an aunt. Their house was spacious and only a block from Birmingham’s Terminal Station, the biggest depot in the South, where Ida and her aunt both worked in the adjacent restaurant. With the two of them gone much of the time, the day-to-day task of raising Herman fell to Ida’s mother. He grew up with mothers all around him, or so the women thought. But the boy felt otherwise. “I never called anybody ‘mother,’” he once confessed. “The woman who’s supposed to be my mother I call ‘other momma.’ I never call anybody ‘mother.’ I never called anybody ‘father.’ I never felt that way.”²

The musician and poet who dubbed himself Sun Ra likewise never called planet Earth his home. “I’m not human,” he said. “I’ve never been part of the planet. I’ve been isolated from a child away from it.”3 In the world but not of it: Sonny Blount (as he was known in his early years) lived at a distance from others and the common concerns that ruled their lives—getting and spending, winning and losing, courting and marrying, even living and dying. He would reject his family. He would leave Birmingham. He felt he was not human. He liked to say he belonged to another race altogether, the angel race, which graced him with an awareness of worlds far superior to planet Earth. “It was as if I was somewhere else that imprinted this purity on my mind, another kind of world. That is my music playing the kind of world I know about. It’s like someone else from another planet trying to find out what to do [. . .] a pure solar world.”⁴

Have you ever felt like an alien? Homeless in a deep cosmic sense? How would you live on a strange planet? The answer for Sonny Blount was his music. The words he uses to describe it sound strange, however: “my music playing the kind of world I know about.” His music plays a world, a “pure solar world.” A world beyond this one, better than this one. This book listens to Sonny’s music as it plays that solar world in all its extraterrestrial strangeness, space music that nevertheless arose in response to life on planet Earth in a country called America and a city called Chicago. However alien Sonny may have felt, he composed music peculiarly suited to the hopes and needs of living people, black city people inhabiting an inhospitable white world. He was the original brother from another planet, dedicated to inventing a future for fellow aliens consigned to dark streets and dead-end dreams.⁵

An astonishing body of work testifies to the vitality of his vision and ranks Sonny Blount among the planet’s most important artists: over two hundred recordings, myriad poems, and countless performances, interviews, videos, and visual images.⁶ But he was equally important as a social activist, using his art to awaken a world on the brink of upheaval. His creative development coincided with the restless decades of the fifties and sixties. As the movement for civil rights gave way to black power, as passive resistance crackled into open defiance, Sonny envisioned another way to change society. “Politics, religion, philosophy have all been tried,” he said, “but music has not been given a chance.”7 His activism drew its inspiration not from a moral or political imperative but, more simply and beautifully, from sound: music to change the planet, space music heralding other, happier worlds. Making it became the purpose of his sojourn on planet Earth: “I would hate to pass through a planet,” he said, “and not leave it a better place.”⁸ Through numerous compositions and recordings, he labored tirelessly to improve life on planet Earth, challenging listeners everywhere to heed a simple call to joy. He became the prophet of a better tomorrow, and music was his message.

Sonny was fond of telling a story that explains how he acquired this vocation. “These space men contacted me. They wanted me to go to outer space with them. They were looking for somebody who had that type of mind.”⁹ Through a process of “transmolecularization,” he lost his human form and found himself transported to the planet Saturn, where the spacemen, little antennas over each ear, taught him “things” that would save planet Earth: “When it looked like the world was going into complete chaos, when there was no hope for nothing, then I could speak, but not until then. I would speak, and the world would listen.”¹⁰ In this narrative, spacemen abduct Sonny and prepare him to communicate a message of salvation to a doomed planet.

In a curious way, this story retells the whole harrowing history of African slavery. Africans were abductees, after all, and the slave ships of the Middle Passage were the first alien motherships. This account of alien abduction assimilates a three-hundred-year history of subjugation to futuristic images of flying saucers and spacemen. It looks backward and forward. It retrofits a history of terror to the Space Age, transforming both to make the world a better place. Sonny Blount was a brilliant and innovative musician. But he was more than that; he was also a poet, a mythmaker, an activist, and a movie star. In everything he did, he worked to beat chains and manacles into dreams, turn history into myth, and transform cries of terror into sounds of joy. “The outer space beings are my brothers,” he said. “They sent me here. They already know my music.”¹¹ Sonny’s music reaches other worlds. Maybe it takes an alien to change planet Earth.