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MULTI-MEDIA FEATURE ON “SONNY’S BLUES”
Sonny in the Dark: Jazzing the Blues Spirit
and the Gospel Truth in James Baldwin’s
“Sonny’s Blues”
Steven C. Tracy
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Abstract
The webs of musical connection are essential to the harmony and cohesion of
James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” As a result, we must explore the spectrum of
musical references Baldwin makes to unveil their delicate conjunctions. It is
vital to probe the traditions of African-American music—Spirituals, Blues, Jazz,
and Pop—to get a more comprehensive sense of how Baldwin makes use of
music from the sacred and secular continuum in the African-American community. Looking more closely at the variety of African-American musical genres to which Baldwin refers in the story, we can discern even more the nuances
of unity that Baldwin creates in his story through musical allusions, and shed
greater light on Baldwin’s exploration of the complexities of African-American
life and music, all of which have as their core elements of human isolation,
loneliness, and despair ameliorated by artistic expression, hope, and the search
for familial ties. Through musical intertextuality, Baldwin demonstrates not
only how closely related seemingly disparate (in the Western tradition) musical
genres are, but also shows that the elements of the community that these genres
flow from and represent are much more in synchronization than they sometimes seem or are allowed to be. To realize kinship across familial (Creole),
socio-economic (the brother), and most importantly for this paper appreciation
and meanings of musical genres advances to Sonny the communal cup of trembling that is both a mode and an instance of envisioning and treating music in
its unifying terms, seeing how they coalesce through a holistic vision.
Keywords: James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” blues, spirituals, jazz, brother, drugs
Multi-Media: A supplementary performance by the author is available on the
JBR website.*
James Baldwin Review, Volume 1, 2015 © The Authors. Published by Manchester University Press and
The University of Manchester Library
http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/JBR.1.10
This is an Open Access article published under the conditions of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivitives licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Sonny in the Dark
165
Since its publication in The Evergreen Review in 1957 and reprinting in Going
to Meet the Man in 1965, James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” has been
lauded as a masterful depiction of the relation of jazz music and the jazz musician
to the African-American community. John M. Reilly rightly points out the regenerative power of the Blues: “[I]n the story of Sonny and his brother an intuition
of the meaning of the Blues repairs the relationship between the two men who
have chosen different ways to cope with the menacing ghetto environment, and
their reconciliation through the medium of this African-American musical form
extends the meaning of the individual’s blues until it becomes a metaphor of
Black community.”1 And Sherley Anne Williams plots a blues progression in that
the “emphasis is gradually transformed from pain to survival to life. All are linked
together by invisible webs, indestructible bonds of tradition and history, and this
heritage, once revealed, becomes the necessary regenerative power which makes
life possible.”2 Because these webs are essential to the harmony and cohesion of
the story, we must explore the spectrum of musical references Baldwin makes to
unveil their delicate conjunctions. It is vital to probe the traditions of AfricanAmerican music—Spirituals, Blues, Jazz, and Pop—to get a more comprehensive
sense of how Baldwin makes use of music from the sacred and secular continuum
in the African-American community. Looking more closely at the variety of
African-American musical genres to which Baldwin refers in the story, we can
discern even more the nuances of unity that Baldwin creates in his story through
musical allusions, and shed greater light on Baldwin’s exploration of the complexities of African-American life and music, all of which have as their core elements
of human isolation, loneliness, and despair ameliorated by artistic expression,
hope, and the search for familial ties. Through musical intertextuality, Baldwin
demonstrates not only how closely related seemingly disparate (in the Western
tradition) musical genres are, but also shows that the elements of the community
that these genres flow from and represent are much more in synchronization than
they sometimes seem or are allowed to be. To realize kinship across familial
(Creole), socio-economic (the brother), and most importantly for this paper appreciation and meanings of musical genres advances to Sonny the communal cup
of trembling that is both a mode and an instance of envisioning and treating
music in its unifying terms, seeing how they coalesce through a holistic vision.
One key to the notion that the story is intended to evoke aural response is
the regular references to listening and hearing in the text—a half dozen explicit
instances. For example, Sonny emphasizes that his brother does not listen to him,
and that it can be difficult for he himself to listen as well, especially with the onus
on Sonny to listen on behalf of others as well as himself, and to translate into
music the tempestuous nature of existence: “You can’t talk it and you can’t make
love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize
nobody’s listening. So you’ve got to listen. You got to find a way to listen.”3 Ultimately, Sonny invites him to the club to hear what he has to say—an act of
courage since sister-in-law Isabel’s family has already humiliated Sonny by complaining about his music, about what they hear, because they don’t understand
166
James Baldwin Review 1
either the music or his obsessive practicing. While Sonny is a jazz performer,
Baldwin is also careful to evoke the gospel music tradition in the text through
allusions to the songs “Lord, You Brought Me from a Long Way Off,” “The Old
Ship of Zion,” “God Be With You’ Til We Meet Again,” and “lf I Could Only
Hear My Mother Pray Again” (note the hearing reference here as well), and to
make Biblical references such as the “cup of trembling” at the end of the story.
By providing a Christian context for the story as well, Baldwin reminds us of the
importance of hearing in the Biblical tradition. In Isaiah 22:14 and 50:4, the
prophet gives precedence to hearing over seeing, and Deuteronomy 5:1 and 6:30
and Jeremiah 2:4 invoke the Jewish faith with the phrase “shema Ysrael”—Hear,
O Israel. What Baldwin does is recognize the relationship between the gospel and
jazz traditions—their similar origins, techniques, and even content—and make a
case for the sacred nature of what Sonny is doing with the “good-time” music of
which his brother was so afraid.4 The brother must listen to Sonny’s story of
painful but holy inspiration: Hear, O Brother, the story of the drinking from the
sacred vessel. On the one hand it is the cup from which all the wicked of the
earth must drink (Psalms 75:8); on the other the cup of salvation (Psalms 116:13),
which variously refers to a cup frequently used for divination, the cup of the
Eucharist, or the holy grail. Or perhaps even more crucially: the cup of God’s
wrath that is taken from the hands of his people and placed in the hands of their
enemies—a message of optimism and reassurance, and an expectation of deliverance (Isaiah 51:17, 22). The blues that Sonny is playing, in a jazz style influenced
by Charlie Parker and his generation of boppers, pounds away at a gospel message
to which the brother, and the entire community, must listen, not from the standpoint of some sacred-secular dichotomy, which is not always distinct in African
diasporic traditions, but from the perspective of the wholeness of the multi-vocal
tradition. Stylistically this is strongly reminiscent of the quintessentially musicallyoriented African-American writer, Langston Hughes. For example, Hughes claims
in “Bop” that the word stems from the sounds of billy clubs on black folks’ heads,
making a crucial connection between socio-political awareness and cultural production, and tracing the sources of African-American art to the experiences of the
Black masses and a primary purpose of African-American art to unify the family/
community that has become fragmented.
Of course, the events of the story take place in an ambience that is not alien
to that of the blues, evoking as they do the frequent sensations of darkness, the
shadows, the trap, the struggling, the isolation, the icy dread that can be associated with the blues. However, these are by no means the only settings or tones
of the blues; neither are they exclusive to the blues. Spirituals, gospel music,
and jazz spring from these same settings, the world in which we must live, and
thus allude to these elements. All make use of similar modes or performance,
distinguished by particular musical characteristics and spiritual values, which
identify their origins and relatedness, but preserve an individuality that is much
like the soloist’s performance practice: showing relationship to the community
traditions, and expressing an important newness and individuality as well. The
Sonny in the Dark
167
troubles of the blues are like the spiritual and gospel songs that describe traveling in the lonesome valley or the lament of the motherless child or the hard
road that Jordan is to travel. Furthermore, like the blues, they provide a way to
acknowledge, manage, and transcend them through philosophy, attitude, and
performance. Set off against the references to darkness, Baldwin makes a halfdozen references to light in the text as well. David Leeming has pointed out that
Beauford Delaney was crucial for Baldwin in showing how the various genres
of African-American music were related: “Delaney was to reconcile for his protegé the music of the Harlem streets with the music of the Harlem churches.”
This reconciliation of what some commentators would see as opposites—sacred
and secular—is important because the recognition that those supposed opposites exist on a continuum of function and meaning that demonstrates how
closely related they are is important to Baldwin’s meaning in “Sonny’s Blues”
and other works. Both Saadi Simawe and Clarence E. Hardy III discuss how
Baldwin connects blues to gospel music in Baldwin’s The Amen Corner for
example, and Hardy asserts that the “blues achieves a kind of sacred status” in
Baldwin’s last novel Just Above My Head.5 However, it is possible to see this as
telegraphed at least as early as “Sonny’s Blues” in Baldwin’s work. Historically,
the intergenerational backdrop for Sonny’s problems—the murder of Sonny’s
good-timing singer-guitarist uncle in the South that haunts his father—follows
the family North in the migratory pattern and theme of restless movement that
was reflected in the lyrics of the first generation of blues singers, whose music
partly grew out of new social situations of geographical mobility following the
end of slavery. Yet there was also the context of slave spirituals in which people
expressed a yearning to escape enslavement and hardships for the journey to
the Promised Land that was also a motivator as well, since it was associated,
hopefully however faultily, with the North. The historical and social context
that Baldwin provides here once again clearly unites the African-American
sacred and secular musical traditions in a way that reveals commonality rather
than bifurcation. Dealing with pain and suffering through ritual acts is not the
exclusive province of either form of music. As Warren J. Carson points out, the
joy and suffering in Baldwin’s work are expressed in music that “may be gospel
or blues, spiritual or jazz—it does not matter which one, or whether it is a combination of two or more forms.”6 The genres of music, like the members of the
family and members of the community, transcend the philosophical, spiritual,
and artistic differences that characterize them. Like a jam session, they engage
each other, not to destroy, but to produce a wholeness that comes from listening and hearing different points of view.
Echoes from various songs found in these African-American musics, as well
as to performers whose work is seminal and to performance settings, abound in
the story. The earliest reference comes in a section where the brother juxtaposes
two scenes from the past that involve his mother. Once again, Baldwin blends
musical intimations of this world and the next in his description of the scene.
The brother recalls how he always sees his mother when she was younger, on
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James Baldwin Review 1
Sunday afternoons after dinner, with church friends and relatives in their living
room, the cruel world crouching threateningly outside. The mother, significantly, is wearing a “pale blue” dress, a reflection of her blues sorrows and powers of endurance consistent with the blues’ philosophy of perseverance in the
face of overwhelming odds. She “owns” the blues, and the travails experienced
and yet to come, on these Sunday afternoons following church, when they have
laid their sorrows and hopes before the Lord. Just as surely, she owns the hope
and powers of endurance that are reflected in the traditional blues lyric, “the
sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday.” There is a particular dread in the
communal silence of things unspeakable in the presence of the young ones in
the room that nonetheless evokes the consciousness of mortality in the children,
a dread that someone artificially tries to dispel by switching on the lights. But
“when the light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness.”7
Immediately, the brother switches his narration to the time when he last saw
his mother. Dressed in black and “humming an old church song, ‘Lord, you
brought me from a long ways off,’” she has buried her husband and tries to impress on the brother the importance of his watching Sonny by telling the story
of their uncle’s death, by using the words unspoken from those Sunday afternoons.8 The song itself deals with salvation brought by God to a sinner who
has experienced “trials” and “tribulations” living “deep in sin.” It reminds, in a
concrete way, of Sonny’s words describing his imprisonment: “But now I feel
like a man who’s been trying to climb up out of some deep, real deep and funky
hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside.”9 The use of
the word “funky” links Sonny to the “friend” who had helped introduce Sonny
to drugs, who smelled “funky” and asserts that Sonny will never get better,
never kick the habit.10 The brother is repulsed by him, yet cannot resist the
impulse to bestow some kindness on him as well—in stark contrast to the way
he ignores Sonny in prison until his own child’s death makes Sonny’s problems
more palpable to him. The sun that Sonny sees as he looks up suggests the possibility of transcendence of his situation, Sonny’s seeing himself outside of his
prison, in the heavens, liberated from his suffering. Sonny is literally “a long
ways off,” but looking for a way home, and it is to his suffering that Baldwin
wishes us to compare the father’s loss of brother, a long ways off in the past
but still present, still palpable, still contextualizing the trials and tribulations of
Sonny and his brother. Sonny and the uncle are the good-timers, Saturday
night music makers, “a little full of the devil” though they “didn’t mean nobody
no harm.”11 The father and the brother are the would-be saviors, who might
protect and lead them from a long ways off—at least that is the mother’s charge
for the brother. Once again the juxtaposition of the “devil’s music” (the blues)
and the church song highlight the interaction of the musics and the nuances of
their relation to each other. While the mother still relies on the church songs
for her faith, Baldwin sees the presence of the gospel truth in the musical
soundtrack of Sonny’s life, jazz, and allows Sonny to deliver both himself and
Sonny in the Dark
169
his brother through his own creation and performance, reuniting the family in
a way that nothing else could.
Of course, Sonny’s generation must negotiate these elements in a way that is
meaningful to them, while making their art contextually relevant to other generations as well. Baldwin introduces this imperative into the text when Sonny
tries to explain his musical influences to his brother, who has obviously not kept
up with contemporary trends in jazz. When Sonny says he wants to play “with—
jazz musicians” his brother replies, “You mean—like Louis Armstrong?”12 Sonny
is so appalled that his brother would bring up the name of a musician whose revolutionary days of the 1920s and 1930s had given away to pop icon status by the
time of the fifties that he almost feels assaulted—“His face closed as though I
struck him”—and refers to Armstrong’s work as “that old-time, down-home
crap.”13 This judgment of Armstrong seems particularly harsh. In the context of
the time the story was written, though, Armstrong’s seemingly almost Tom-ish
antics with his ebullient smile and white handkerchief, connection with the
“mouldy fig” establishment of jazz traditionalists, and pop leanings had placed
him some distance from a jazz avant garde that sought to project less of an image
as entertainers as serious artistes worthy of “proper” respect and consideration.
Whereas Armstrong had been the leading revolutionary and virtuoso of his time
—and worthy of exalted status—it was necessary for the younger generations of
Swing (1930s), Bop (1940’s), and even cool, post-bop, and nascent third stream
and free jazz movements (1950s) to draw on Armstrong’s legacy, even as they
were rejecting what they saw as the limitations of his music for expressing the
tenor of the times. The boppers heard Armstrong’s melodic and rhythmic invention pushing the boundaries of jazz and pop music with virtuosic flair (along with
the developments of Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins and Art
Tatum), and brought the electric, quicksilver nervous despair, searching experimentalism, and supreme command of their instruments to bear in their expression of their own times. To refer to Armstrong as Sonny’s brother does is almost
to try to press an outmoded traditionalism of style, image, and behavior on
Sonny—another method of molding him in the brother’s dated, uninformed image of what was appropriate, at a time when Sonny was seeking a newness
and individuality, at least something much more current that Armstrong’s
1920s style. Sonny goes to great lengths to distance both himself and Parker
from the brother, suggesting paradoxically that the brother has never heard
of him because Parker is so great. Actually, the brother intimates that the
standards by which Parker—and he himself—must be considered are so far
from conventional, mainstream notions of greatness that it is unimaginable
that society could approach an understanding of what and how Parker communicates. Of course, it is the task of society to catch up with its avant garde
artists, to understand and cherish their insights and contributions, although
by definition the understanding always comes a bit late, at least. But here, it is
also the task of Sonny’s brother, if he is to succeed in carrying out his mother’s
wishes to help protect and nurture Sonny, to learn from Sonny as well. Sonny, in
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James Baldwin Review 1
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