CORRESPONDENT

Picture a stately yet campy mature black gent, dressed in blue, bedecked with butterflies, distinctively erudite yet down with the people, with a dialect embracing both Ivy-schooled classic literature and street slang. Maybe you have actually seen him over the years on Cambridge streets, at festivals, or leading open mics. If so, you’ve caught the inimitable Brother Blue.

“I first met Brother Blue on the streets of Harvard Square in the early 1980s,” recalled Squawk Coffeehouse co-proprietor and character actress Jessa Piaia. “Almost as soon as I moved to Cambridge from Milwaukee, I kept hearing about this incredible storyteller who told stories ‘barefoot in the snow’ during the blizzard of '78. I ran over to catch every word.” Piaia added movement to Blue’s spoken word and became fast friends with both he and wife Ruth Hill, whom she worked alongside as well in the oral history department at Radcliffe’s Schlessinger Library.

Tomorrow evening, May 15, Squawk Coffeehouse will host a special Book Party for the just-released “Ahhhh! A Tribute to Brother Blue and Ruth Edmonds Hill.” The book, published by Somerville's Yellow Moon Press, is a compilation of stories, poems and photos submitted by area poets, writers, artists and just plain fans. A committee from LANES, the League for the Advancement of New England Storytellers, also based in Somerville, assisted in the project. "As I understand, they had so much contributed material that it became quite a parrying-down procedure," said Piaia.

Born Hugh Morgan Hill in Cleveland, Ohio, the future tale spinner entered Harvard in the 1940s on a scholarship as one of the few black students at the college. Though he told stories at both Sunday church services and Sunday school classes he taught while earning a degree with honors, his storytelling career didn’t begin until the late 1960s, when he had returned to Harvard to study for a doctorate of divinity (having completed a master's degree at Yale in the interim). He was also visiting and reading classic literature at local prisons. With his Harvard professors cool to this plan, he finished his Ph.D. at an alternative university in Ohio, writing a dissertation on stories told at a jail, accompanied by a musical ensemble of prisoners.

Brother Blue has performed on street corners and stages including the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee and a radio show in Japan. In his mix are American folktales, poetry and odes to his many muses, thoughts on Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, recollections of his childhood during the Depression and his service as a black WWII lieutenant in a segregated army. Or, audience members suggest something. Whatever it is, seems he's got a story, nearly always improv'd.

“To me storytelling is a sacred calling,” said Hill/Blue. “I believe I was put on this earth to tell stories to all creatures, to the stars, the wind, the tree, the stone, and the angels.” He begins each day on his knees facing the East. “I drink a little water from a sacred chalice and eat a piece of bread, and make a promise to tell stories that will feed the hungry and the thirsty in the Soul, that will heal the broken heart, the broken mind, the broken body.”

Each Tuesday evening at the Sherrill Library at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, he and Ruth hold a 7 p.m. open mic which they began in 1992. They pay their featured tellers, and the venue is so popular that sign-up is often six months to a year in advance.

“To be a storyteller is to be in a sacred order, to be a flute, a trumpet, a drum for God, the teller and the listener,” he continued. “No book can teach you this. No teacher can teach you this. Only the God in you can sing this song through you.”

Squawk’s Lee Kidd Riethmiller first met Brother Blue as a Harvard Divinity School classmate in 1967, where their teachers and mentors included Peter Gomes, Krister Stendahl, and Harvey Cox. The following year, Riethmiller (now founder and president of the Intercontinental Foreign Language Program in Harvard Square) and Doug Koch (now organist at Old Cambridge Baptist Church) helped form a “Brother Blue ensemble.” “We performed as troubadours in the bardic tradition at area colleges and ecumenical youth programs,” Riethmiller recalled.

“I promise to live the story of unconditional love,” said the original Blue Man. “I promise to sing a song from the middle of the middle of Brother Blue to the middle of the middle of all creation.”

A book party in honor of Brother Blue and Ruth Edmonds Hill will be held May 15 from 9 p.m.-midnight at Squawk Coffeehouse, at the Harvard-Epworth Methodist Church at 1555 Mass. Ave. in Harvard Square. The Harvard-Epworth is located between Harvard & Porter Squares, and is next to Harvard Law School's Pound Hall. For info, visit https://www.angelfire.com/music/squawk/ or call 617-868-3661. The Tuesday evening open storytelling mic is held at the Episcopal Divinity School, Mason St. & Phillips Place, just outside Harvard Square, Cambridge MA. Ruth Hill: (617) 491-8399. r_hill@radcliffe.edu.

For information on Yellow Moon Press, located at 689 Somerville Ave., Somerville, please call 800-497-4385, fax 617-776-8246 or Email story@yellowmoon.com.