22 Facts About Brother Blue

Hugh Morgan Hill, known as Brother Blue, was an American educator, storyteller, actor, musician, and street performer based principally in the Boston area.

Brother Blue 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 Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, named for W E B Du Bois, the first African American to earn a Harvard PhD in 1895.

Brother Blue's award was accepted posthumously on his behalf by his spouse, Ruth Edmonds Hill, oral historian at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, on December 4,2009.

Brother Blue acknowledged the butterfly's ancient Greek association with the psyche.

Brother Blue's clothing was often covered in butterfly medallions and blue butterflies were frequently painted on his cheeks and the palms of his hands, sometimes even drawn on with a ballpoint pen.

Brother Blue wore a predominantly blue ensemble, sporting blue turtlenecks or collared shirts and blue pants.

Brother Blue frequently wore a blue beret on which butterfly pins, some with rhinestones or sea opals, were affixed.

Brother Blue wore a sash emblazoned with "BROTHER BLUE STORYTELLER" in his capacity as Official Storyteller of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Brother Blue referred to himself as a street poet and, alluding to Saint Francis of Assisi, as "God's fool".

Brother Blue 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 his signature story about a caterpillar's first vision of a butterfly.

Brother Blue drew thematic inspiration from ancient story cycles, African and Franco-Welsh legend, Shakespeare, modern jazz interpretations, and improvisation.

Brother Blue's refusal to assign grades to graduate students in his university courses was a source of controversy.

Cautious of "the green dance" of pursuing wealth, Brother Blue eschewed the world of commerce as much as he rejected quantifying people's aptitude, explaining that he preferred to address people "in their wonderfulness".

Brother Blue believed that telling stories is a divine calling.

Brother Blue made music with a set of genuine early American slave chains in a signature story he developed during his time as a Divinity School teaching fellow.

Brother Blue advised a live, partially extemporaneous performance of the Gilgamesh and Inanna cycle for this exhibit at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California.

European figures referenced in Brother Blue's opus include: Albert Einstein, Homer, Virgil, Dante, William Shakespeare and particularly St Francis of Assisi and Don Quixote, to whose life stories he would compare his, his colleagues' and his audiences' works and lives.

Brother Blue said he wanted to be "the black Clarence Darrow," which is why he had intended to go to law school before finding his calling at Yale School of Drama.

African-American and African-related motifs referenced in Brother Blue's opus include: "a chicken with a busted wing", lions, elephants, Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

Brother Blue spoke about skin color and racial issues, and his own experience of being African American.

Brother Blue was frequently featured by the US National Association of Black Storytellers and is frequently referenced by the US griot movement, spearheaded by oral storyteller griots such as Michael D McCarty in Los Angeles, California, who are extending the original West African griot tradition.