The Importance Of Music In Sonny's Blues

The Importance of Music in “Sonny’s Blues” James Baldwin, an African-American writer, was born to a minister in 1924 and survived his childhood in New York City. The author is infamous for his pieces involving racial separatism with support from the blues. Readers can understand Harlem as a negative, unsafe environment from Baldwin’s writings and description of his hometown as a “dreadful place…a kind of concentration camp” (Hicks). Until the writer was at the age of twenty-four, he lived in a dehumanizing, racist world where at ten years old, he was brutally assaulted by police officers for the unchanging fact that he is African-American. In 1948, Baldwin escaped to France to continue his work without the distractions of the racial injustice

Perhaps the blues was representation of optimism and faith for the entire city of Harlem and all of African-American descent. Music is portrayed fluently and abundantly throughout the entire story of “Sonny’s Blues”. Despite the fact that Sonny frequently plays the piano, there is always a juke box playing, the “humming an old church song”, a “jangling beat of a tambourine”, a tune being whistled, or a revival meeting with the singing of religious words (Baldwin 293-307). The repetition of music in the short story is a realistic portrayal of how regular the blues, musically and emotionally, was present in an African-American’s life during the era of racial discrimination. Flibbert explains that the rooted, burdensome emotion felt by African Americans is difficult to put to words, other than describing it as the blues. He best defines the blues as “a mental and emotional state arising from recognition of limitation imposed-in the case of African-Americans-by racial barriers to the community” (Flibbert). Though a definite definition exists, the blues cannot simply be construed. To cope with this unexplainable feeling of blue, the African-American folk genre of jazz music was created. Finally, the blues was something African-Americans owned and that the white man could not strip them of. Though music appears to show up at the most troublesome times in “Sonny’s Blues”, it brings along “a glimmer of life within the

Quietness emerged in the cab ride with Sonny and the narrator due to a dismal, nervous situation. In the living room full of church folks, “the silence, the darkness coming, and darkness in the faces frightens the child obscurely” (Baldwin 299). Quietness interrupts Mama’s story about her brother-in-law who was ran over and killed by a white man. Only silence is left when the revival meeting is broken up. Additionally, absence of sound remained when Sonny fled from Isabel’s house and joined the navy. Most importantly, no further noise was heard after little Grace’s fall. To state the obvious, absence of sound took place in “Sonny’s blues” in many incidences of negativity and melancholy. As music became the symbol for brightness, silence became an emblem of the opposite. The sound of “that thump and then that silence” frightened Isabel, the narrator’s wife and Grace’s mother, after hearing her daughter fall and no subsequent sound. The mother knew of the darkness of silence, as it beckoned her to run for Grace. The little girl could not scream due to loss of breath, which concluded with death from polio. This unfortunate event is yet another symbol interlaced within the short story. “The loss of grace is the loss of voice and sound…there is a suggestion that Sonny, a metaphorically lost child, might yet regain or reclaim a state of grace through his