Lunch with Ben Franklin
“Hello, I’m Ben Franklin,” said the bespectacled man sitting across from me during lunch on June 26th at the dining hall on Temple University’s campus. The night before, the gentleman portraying Franklin, B.J. Pryor, had read the Declaration of Independence during the opening plenary session of the Braver Angels National Convention held in the very city where Franklin signed the revolutionary document 250 years ago, Philadelphia.
I attended the convention, which brought together citizens who identify as Red, Blue, and Independent, and participated in several events as a featured speaker. During one of them, “Music’s Role in Courageous Citizenship,” I said the following:
It was after that panel that I met Mr. Pryor, who resembles Franklin. We chatted about my work as co-founder of the Jazz Leadership Project and co-director of the Omni-American Project, as well as his work as a historian at a museum in Virginia for 40 years, and his decision to portray Franklin after retiring. Franklin’s legacy, including the evolution of his views on the Negro American people of his time and his post-Revolutionary work as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, was another theme of our conversation.
Ellison and Murray on Ben Franklin
Then, I wondered to myself: What did Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray think of Franklin? They certainly honored the founders’ role in establishing what Ellison called our sacred documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. These, in turn, allowed Americans to live “in the presence of more human freedom and individual opportunity than they or anybody else had ever seen before,” as Murray put it in The Omni-Americans.
But to share a more specific rendering with the Franklin impersonator, I pulled out my phone and put the question above into Google’s NotebookLM. This AI tool allows you to upload documents and then engage in inquiry based on the content. I have uploaded much of Ellison and Murray’s nonfiction there. So, here’s the answer from Notebook LM that I shared with Mr. Pryor:
Based on their cultural philosophies and explicit writings, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray would view Benjamin Franklin as a quintessential archetype of the American spirit—specifically as a master of improvisation, self-fashioning, and strategic masking.
Their interpretation of Franklin highlights several key concepts in their work:
1. Franklin as the Ultimate "Masking Joker"
In his essay "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," Ralph Ellison explicitly points to Benjamin Franklin to explain how American identity is fundamentally theatrical and mutable. Ellison wrote:
"Benjamin Franklin, the practical scientist, skilled statesman and sophisticated lover, allowed the French to mistake him for Rousseau's Natural Man... America is a land of masking jokers."
To Ellison, Franklin understood that to navigate the world and achieve democratic or diplomatic goals, an American must know how to adopt a persona. By wearing plain clothes and shunning courtly fashion to play the role of the "rustic philosopher" for the French elite, the highly sophisticated Franklin demonstrated the characteristically American art of the mask. Ellison argued that this fluid, performance-based identity is a shared national trait that links historical white figures like Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Mark Twain with the improvisational masking found in African American folklore and the blues tradition.
Murray riffed on masking too, as in a passage from The Blue Devils of Nada on the “stylized masks of stylized smiles and stylized dignity and concern” of “black” doormen, headwaiters, bell captains, and chauffeurs, who were also skilled practitioners of this American art.
2. A Master of the Vernacular Style
Both Murray and Ellison championed the "vernacular" style—the dynamic process where individuals take raw, everyday materials and improvise to create something elegant and functional.
They would view Franklin’s life as a supreme early example of this trait. Franklin was a printer, an inventor, a civic planner, and a diplomat who lacked formal aristocratic training but used his wits, observation, and experimentation to navigate his environment. This aligns perfectly with Albert Murray’s definition of the blues idiom: an attitude of pragmatism, flexibility, and "creativity in an emergency". Franklin did not rely on rigid European dogma; he improvised solutions—from lightning rods to the structure of civic institutions—embodying the exact style of open-ended experimentation that Ellison and Murray celebrated in American culture.
Ellison and Murray adapted this perspective on the American vernacular from John A. Kouwenhoven. When I asked Murray about him in the book Murray Talks Music, he said: “He zoomed in on what was American about American culture… the interaction of the learned tradition with the native, vernacular, or homespun methods of doing things… in [a] context made for perpetual experimentation on the frontier and in an atmosphere of free enterprise—or experimental attitude.”
3. Writing His Own "Signature on Actuality"
Albert Murray wrote extensively about the concept of the individual asserting their identity by improvising in the face of a challenge, describing it as the requirement to "establish your identity, to write your signature on the epidermis of actuality."
Franklin's famous Autobiography is a literal and literary manifestation of this idea. Rather than accepting a pre-determined social status or rigid Puritan constraints, Franklin consciously self-fashioned a new identity as a civic-minded, free-thinking citizen of a new republic. Murray and Ellison would view Franklin not as a rigid historical monument, but as an early American protagonist who treated life like a jazz solo—accepting the foundational realities of his time and using them to improvise a completely original existence.
For Murray, “writing your signature on the epidermis of actuality” meant your singular response to the reality of cosmic entropy. Such responses took on mythic resonance for Murray, which is why in 1997 he said: “My perception is that whatever self you create is mythic. The downtrodden, that’s a myth. The heroic, that’s a myth too… you’ve got to translate the quotidian into metaphor. Why not metaphors of heroism?”
Out Chorus
Sitting there in the dining hall, I was struck by the layered resonance of the moment. A retired historian wearing Franklin's mask. A writer steeped in blues idiom wisdom, consulting a machine trained on the words of Ellison and Murray. All of it unfolding in the city where the founding improvisation began, 250 years on. Franklin, the printer who mastered the newest information technology of his age, would have appreciated the scene. He might even have asked to check out my cell phone.
Presidential historian Doug Brinkley said it well on CBS Sunday Morning: “May we pause to thank the Founders, imperfect men, who gave us not just the gift of freedom, but the responsibility to preserve it.” The founders left us a lead sheet, not a finished score. The Declaration states the theme, the Constitution sets the changes, the Bill of Rights improvises and elaborates on those thematic chord changes. What remains, for every generation of Americans, is the obligation to take choruses worthy of the American song, for as many bars as we’ve got.