John Bunion Murray was illiterate and a descendant of slaves. He worked as a sharecropper on various plantations. A devout Christian, he married in 1929 and had eleven children. He separated from his wife in the late 1950s and lived alone in a cabin. It was after an ecstatic experience in the 1970s that he began to create. His drawings are composed of writings and totemic figures imbued with Vodou. Dictated by God and understandable only by Him, the texts, he said, were to be read through a bottle of "holy" water drawn from his well:

"When I began, I prayed and prayed. And the Lord sent a vision of the sun. Everything I see comes from the sun. He showed me the signs and the seasons and told me. And when I left the hospital, the eagle met my gaze... a spiritual eagle. The eagle can see farther than any bird in the world, and that is why I can see things that others cannot. That is when I began to write these letters. A different script that represents different languages and different people. It is the language of the Holy Spirit that comes directly from God."