Hugh Morgan Hill, the Storyteller Brother Blue, Dies at 88 (original) (raw)

Nov. 26, 2009

Hugh Morgan Hill, who as the storyteller known as Brother Blue captivated passers-by on the streets of Boston and Cambridge, Mass., with his parables, life stories and idiosyncratic retellings of Shakespeare’s plays, and who became a fixture at storytelling conferences and gatherings in the United States and abroad, died on Nov. 3 at his home in Cambridge. He was 88.

The death was confirmed by his wife, Ruth.

Mr. Hill, a playwright by training, began attracting audiences in the late 1960s when he took to the streets and started declaiming as Brother Blue.

He was hard to miss, a gangly black man dressed from head to toe in blue, with blue-tinted glasses, a blue stocking cap or beret, and blue butterflies drawn on his face and palms with a felt-tip pen. Blessed with a resonant voice and a commanding stage presence, he was equal parts entertainer, shaman, motivational speaker and, as he liked to say, “holy fool.”

“He was the John Coltrane of storytelling,” said Warren Lehrer, author of the 1995 book “Brother Blue: A Narrative Portrait of Brother Blue, a k a Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill,” who first encountered Mr. Hill in the early 1980s. “He had his repertoire, but he would improvise, working off news items, or things he was seeing at the moment, or people in the audience, with parenthetical digressions as thoughts occurred to him.”

Mr. Hill was born on July 12, 1921, in Cleveland, where his father labored as a bricklayer and raised his family in a white neighborhood. “He would say, ‘We were one black button in a field of snow,’ ” said Rob Evans, a management consultant and longtime friend of Mr. Hill’s.

His younger brother, Tommy, who was retarded, had trouble pronouncing his brother’s name and settled on “Brother Boo,” which Mr. Hill changed to Brother Blue when he began telling stories in prisons in the ’60s.

A grade-school teacher, Miss Wunderlich, recognized that young Hugh was a bright student and encouraged him to excel. Her words later found their way into an oft-repeated story, one of many Mr. Hill told to inspire listeners to dream big and push themselves to achieve. His brother’s fascination with butterflies also provided him with an important symbol for his stories, which often dealt with personal transformation.

During World War II, Mr. Hill was in the Army, where he served in the European and Pacific theaters and rose to the rank of first lieutenant. Under the G.I. Bill of Rights he attended Harvard, from which he graduated in 1948 with a degree in what was then called social relations, a combination of psychology, sociology and anthropology.

After marrying Ruth Edmonds in 1950, he earned a master’s degree in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1953. As he struggled to write plays, his wife said, he would describe them to friends, and from these sessions he developed his storytelling persona.

Brother Blue would declaim to an audience of one or a hundred, fixing listeners with a stare that, more than a few believed, penetrated to the deepest recesses of their souls. It made perfect sense when the film director George Romero cast him as a modern-day Merlin in his Arthurian biker film “Knightriders” (1981) “I was blown away by this wild man telling stories on the street,” said Laura Packer of Malden, Mass., who screwed up the courage to become a storyteller after meeting him. “He looked into my face and said, ‘You have the power.’ That was it for me.”

Brother Blue dealt in uplift and inspiration, telling stories from his own life or folk tales from Africa and Asia. He often performed short versions of Shakespeare’s plays, taking all the parts himself and translating the main plot points into street language. “Don’t be no fool, be cool,” his King Lear told Cordelia, in the play’s opening scene. “Go for the gold, baby.” At intervals, he would recite lines as written by the man he called “Willie the Shake.”

Mr. Hill earned a doctorate in storytelling from Union Graduate School, an experimental “university without walls,” in 1973. His thesis, on prison storytelling, was performed with a 25-piece jazz orchestra.

In addition to his wife, who is the oral history curator at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, he is survived by a sister, Beatrice Hill, of Streetsboro, Ohio.

Mr. Hill regarded storytelling as a sacred duty and a path to universal harmony. “When you tell a story, you tell it to all creation,” he once said. “It’s cosmic. It never goes away.”

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