Sonny's Blues

Throughout “Sonny’s Blues” Baldwin explores the relationship between music and suffering, presenting music as a crucial method by which individuals can process and deal with their suffering and pain. Though the theme of music is primarily expressed through Sonny, who is a jazz pianist, Baldwin also explores gospel music. In an anecdote later in the story, the narrator and Sonny observe an “old-fashioned revival meeting” taking place on the sidewalk outside the narrator’s apartment (38). The group of three women and a male preacher begin singing a song that has a restorative effect on the listeners outside: “the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them; and time seemed, nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to their first condition, while dreaming of their last” (39). The music allows the listeners on the street to forget their suffering so much that they appear reborn to the narrator.

The music’s restorative power is elaborated on in the book’s final scene, when the narrator listens to Sonny play piano at the club. As the narrator hears Sonny’s jazz solo, he recognizes how Sonny transmutes his suffering into the music: “Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life” (47).