Sun Ra’s mind-expanding reading list from 1971
Herman Poole Blount was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914. That’s if you believe the census anyway. If you believe the musician formerly known as Mr Blount, then you’ll find he was never really born at all. “I am Sun Ra ambassador from the intergalactic regions of the council of outer space,” he said, and such a status doesn’t come with a birth certificate, just a freedom to funk people for the good of the world.
At one point of his unending journey – a point that is hard to determine (but roughly translates to the early 1940s in layman’s terms) – he was baptised in the hectic zeitgeist of the jazz scene and took up the legal moniker of Le Sony’r Ra, later shortened to Sun Ra in homage to the Egyptian God of our nearest star. He also believed that he was an angel from Saturn. And as you might expect, he was known in the local papers as “an eccentric character”.
However, aside from the eccentricities and the mystical credo of iconoclasm that was shared with the world, he was also defined by virtuoso talents that have inspired a generation of musicians from all sorts of genres. As a pianist and bandleader, Sun Ra was basically everything that comes under the term ‘renaissance man’, and he was also a thousand other things.
Ultimately, although it is not easily discernible, it would seem that his goal was to embalm the hardships of the black American experience with some sort of celestial abstraction tying life back to humanity’s roots on the banks of the Nile. This philosophy might not have stood up to the science of white-coated anthropologists who claim that Hadar, Ethiopia, is more accurate, but Sun Ra didn’t really care for anything that wasn’t enshrined in the ether of his own mysticism, so he preferred the drama of the Nile.
While academic accuracy might not have been at the forefront of his thinking, that didn’t stop Sun Ra from becoming the artist-in-residence at UC Berkeley back in 1971. Therein, the great jazz man offered a series of lectures on African-American Studies 198, or as he called the class by turns, ‘Sun Ra 171’, ‘The Black Man in the Universe’, or ‘The Black Man in the Cosmos’.
His typical lectures revolved around twisting bible verses, like a mathematician reverse-engineering an equation, to reappraise the word’s meaning through the lens of Egyptology. In this manner, he incorporated the entirety of human as context to look at the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, pollution, capitalism and Neoplatonism.
Thankfully, for those who were a little bewildered by his bizarre universal scope, he provided a reading list, which we have, in turn, provided for your own mind-expansion below; consume with caution.
Sun Ra’s reading list:
- The Egyptian Book of the Dead
- Radix
- Alexander Hislop – Two Babylons
- The Theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky
- The Book of Oahspe
- Henry Dumas – Ark of Bones
- Henry Dumas – Poetry for My People
- Leroi Jones & Larry Neal – Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
- David Livingston – Missionary Travels
- Theodore P. Ford – God Wills the Negro
- Archibald Rutledge – God’s Children
- John S. Wilson – Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It’s At
- Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan – Black Man of the Nile and His Family
- Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney – The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, and the Law of Nature
- The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (Ra’s description of The King James Bible)
- Pjotr Demianovitch Ouspensky – A New Model of the Universe. Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art
- Frederick Bodmer – The Loom of Language. An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages
- Richard J. Cunliffe – Blackie’s Etymology
