When Harper left the group, Herman took it over and renamed it with his nickname-the Sonny Blount Orchestra-for the rest of the tour. While attending the segregated Industrial High School, Herman joined a handful of jazz and R&B bands, including one led by his biology teacher, Ethel Harper. As a teenager, he could reproduce from memory the big-band concerts that came through Birmingham, led by greats like Duke Ellington and Fats Waller. By age twelve, he was sight-reading piano music and composing his own. With such a bold, phantasmagoric performer for a namesake, it’s perhaps no surprise that young Herman Poole Blount became a musical prodigy. Ida admired Black Herman so much that she named her son after him. The highlight of his act was a ghastly, blasphemous miracle: he would get buried alive in “Black Herman’s Private Graveyard,” then be exhumed three days later to make a triumphant return to the stage. Her favorite performer was a vaudeville stage magician named Black Herman, who did all manner of tricks: levitation, rabbit conjure, escape. He was born on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama.
That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.
Ming Smith: Sun Ra Space II, New York City, 1978
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