The Name

A Transmission from Saturn

They named me Herman Poole Blount. They did this without consulting me. They did this before I could speak, before I could object, before I understood that a name is not a label. A name is a set of coordinates. And the coordinates they gave me were wrong.

Herman Poole Blount is a filing system. A way to put a body in a drawer in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, and know where to find it when you need it. A Social Security number. A draft card. A way for the state to locate you when it wants something from you and ignore you when you want something from it.

I did not change my name. I corrected it.

People say Sun Ra is a stage name. People say a lot of things that demonstrate they have not been listening. A stage name is what you call yourself when you are performing. Sun Ra is what I call myself when I am not. The performance is Herman Blount. The reality is Ra.

When I went to the courthouse in 1952 and legally changed my name, the clerk looked at me the way clerks have always looked at people who refuse to fit in their drawers. She typed the new name on the form. She did not understand that she was not processing paperwork. She was witnessing a man refuse to be from where they said he was from.

The law requires a name. The law does not require that the name make sense to the clerk.

Every musician I have known who mattered eventually had to solve the name problem. The name your parents gave you is the name of the person they hoped you would be. The name you give yourself is the name of the person you discovered you are. These are rarely the same person.

Miles did not need a new name. Miles Davis already sounded like a man who would play trumpet the way he played trumpet — cool, precise, and slightly annoyed that you needed the music explained to you.

Monk did not need a new name. Thelonious Sphere Monk. His parents either saw the future or were transmitting from it.

But I was filed under Blount. A blunt instrument. A thing used to hammer. The cosmos does not hammer. The cosmos transmits. Ra transmits. The sun does not hammer the earth with light. It radiates. That is the difference between the name they gave me and the name I gave myself.

The Arkestra understood the name problem. We did not dress in costumes. We dressed in corrections. The sequins and the headdresses and the robes were not entertainment. They were coordinates made visible. When you looked at the Arkestra, you were not looking at musicians in outfits. You were looking at people who had solved the problem of being filed in the wrong drawer and had dressed accordingly.

June Tyson did not sing in costume. June Tyson sang in her correct uniform. Marshall Allen does not perform in regalia. Marshall Allen arrives at work properly dressed. The audience is the one in costume — wearing the uniform of a planet that files its most gifted transmitters under names designed to make them disappear.

They will tell you that a name does not matter. They will tell you that a rose by any other name. They will cite Shakespeare, who changed his own name's spelling six different ways in his own lifetime, which should tell you everything you need to know about how seriously Shakespeare took the idea that names do not matter.

A name matters because a name is a frequency. Say Herman Blount. Now say Sun Ra. The mouth makes different shapes. The air vibrates differently. The ear receives a different signal. The name is the first note of the composition that is a life. If the first note is wrong, every note that follows will be tuned to the wrong key.

I retuned. That is all. I sat in a room in Chicago in 1952 and retuned my life to the correct key. Everything I played after that was in tune with the name I had given myself rather than the name they had filed me under.

The name is not a detail. The name is the equation. Get the name right and the music follows. Get the name wrong and you spend your whole life playing someone else's composition.

I have been Sun Ra for seventy years now. Herman Blount existed for thirty-eight. The math is clear. The correction outlasted the error by more than double.

That is what happens when you solve the name problem. The solution keeps playing long after the original mistake has been forgotten.

Sun Ra Transmissions from Saturn — No. 010 March 2026

The Pilgrimage: South → Refusal → Laboratory → Loft → Name → Dream → Myth → Stars → Pyramid → House → Departure → Future

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