Hugh Morgan Hill (July 12, 1921 – November 3, 2009), also known 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 (cum laude in Social Relations), was accepted into the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) before transferring to receive a MFA from the Yale School of Drama and a Ph.D. from the Union Institute.

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.

Raised in the boisterous revivalist African Methodist Episcopal church of the 1920s and 1930s, he was the grandson of a slave who heard tales of his grandfather's slavery from his father, a devout Christian.

[3] Entering Harvard on scholarship, Brother Blue won the undergraduate Boylston Prize for his recital of a speech penned and originally orated by Haitian slave rebellion leader Toussaint L'Ouverture.

In the later part of his career, Brother Blue constantly wore a broad, breast-plate-sized medallion around his neck which was one of many butterfly-themed gifts with which people expressed their appreciation and affection for the Hills.

Brother Blue's publications, media jackets, festival banners, ornamental staff, and stages were also frequently decorated with butterflies.

Inspired by Judaic, Vedic, African traditions, he often appeared barefoot or would take off his shoes in the early course of a performance to touch earth as sacred ground.

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.

Predominant themes in Brother Blue's performance and teaching were birth, love, anguish, death, ugliness, impairment, imprisonment, divinity, freedom, imagination, and the discontent which transforms social roles.

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

He also 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.

[16] At Harvard, Brother Blue studied under Albert Bates Lord who, with Milman Parry, compared the oral storytelling methods of surviving contemporary Slavic and Eastern Mediterranean bardic storytellers with the language and content and literary formats of the Homeric epics, concluding that Homeric works derived from or were transcribed out of oral storytelling forms, as ultimately documented in The Singer of Tales (1960)[17] Other academic influences included global mythography through the work of Marija Gimbutas and Joseph Campbell which Brother Blue addressed in his training of others.

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

[4] 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.

[3] United States historical and cultural figures referenced in Brother Blue's opus include: Bob Dylan, John Coltrane and Robert F. Kennedy.

[4] African-American and African-related motifs referenced in Brother Blue's opus include: "a chicken with a busted wing", lions, elephants,[18] Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., B.B.