page_title: Brother Blue
section_title: Opus
hierarchical_section_title: Brother Blue / Opus
caption_attribution_description: English: Brother Blue performing in Harvard Square circa 1979
context_page_description: Hugh Morgan Hill who performed as Brother Blue, was an American educator, storyteller, actor, musician, and street performer based principally in the Boston area. After serving as First Lieutenant from 1943 to 1946 in the segregated United States Army in World War II and being honorably discharged, he received a BA from Harvard College in 1948, was accepted into the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences before transferring to receive a MFA from the Yale School of Drama and a Ph.D. from the Union Institute, having delivered his doctoral presentation at Boston's Deer Island Prison, accompanied by a 25-piece jazz orchestra, with a video recording for his dissertation committee's further consideration. While performing frequently at U.S. National Storytelling Festivals and flown abroad by organizations and patrons from England to Russia and the Bahamas, Brother Blue regularly performed on the streets around Cambridge, most notably in Harvard Square. He was the Official Storyteller of Boston and of Cambridge by resolutions of both city councils.
  Brother Blue was a 2009 recipient of the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from the W. E. B.
context_section_description: "From the middle of the middle of me," Brother Blue would say, swirling his finger in magical airs in the space between you then gently tapping it toward your heart, "to the middle of the middle of you ..." And he would say with growling resonance, "I am older than the oldest stories, I am the storyteller." A signature story which gave form to one face of this archetypal "storyteller" from Blue is his tale of Muddy Duddy, a fictional musician who could hear the sound of a harp coming out of the earth.
  Brother Blue's unique style of storytelling made extensive use of rhyme, rhythm, and improvisation, creating a verbal jazz of words and images. He referred to himself as a street poet and, in the same words as Saint Francis of Assisi, as "God's fool". He told idiosyncratic versions of Shakespeare's King Lear, "The Big O, Othell-O" and Romeo and Juliet, a variety of self-mythologizing autobiographical stories, and always his signature story about a caterpillar's first vision of a butterfly. MacArthur Fellow, Salzburg Festival bad boy wunderkind of re-visioned theatrical works Peter Sellars (Harvard College Class of 1981) cast Brother Blue as an idiosyncratic actor in updated classical productions in such venues as The American Repertory Theater.
  As an educator, Brother Blue taught at the Episcopal and Harvard Divinity Schools, then with Ruth Hill in the Harvard Storytelling Workshop held in venues across Harvard University's campus, on television through WGBH, and in his most casual later forum, Storytelling with Brother Blue.
  The epic in the human situation, fundamental issues of birth, love, loss of siblings, anguish, death, subjective ugliness, impairment, imprisonment, divinity, freedom, imagination, daring, yearning, and the discontent which transforms social roles, conveyed through the most ancient of story cycles, African and Franco-Welsh legend, Shakespeare, modern jazz interpretations, and post-post-modern improvisation reaching directly to epic gestalt through even humble incidents are an enduring weight in Brother Blue's compositions, performance, professing in academia and in practica.
  Often these grand themes would pour through picaresque characters, though also through socially high profile characters portrayed such as Othello or unnamed archetypal personalities such as the Old Storyteller or This Little Girl or Someone Who's Somewhere Everywhere.
caption: Brother Blue performing in Harvard Square circa 1979
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