The Significance Of Music In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

he title of Sonny’s Blues gives away one of the story’s main focuses: music and what it represents to different people. James Baldwin creates characters who see music, especially jazz music, much differently from and who represent the views of people in the real world. Baldwin explores the good and bad views of music by creating a character who lives because of music and characters who believe music is evil and a nuisance.
To Sonny, music represents the goodness in life and the joy that life can give us. When Sonny is staying with Isabel and her parents, the narrator says that, “ Sonny was at that piano playing for his life,” this means that Sonny was using music as an escape from the darkness around him. Sonny plays music as a way to cope with the suffering that he has been through. He tells the narrator that heroin and

music are ways to cope with the suffering in life and that everyone has a way to deal with life; Sonny’s way to cope is with music. Sonny’s life revolves, functions and thrives off of the music he plays. Music allows him to pour out his emotions and lets people hear the torture going on in his life in a way that makes Sonny feel less weighed down by those tortures.
James Baldwin creates a contrast between Sonny’s views about music and the other characters in the story. To the narrator, the kind of music that Sonny plays represents the evil in the world. When Sonny tells the narrator about the jazz he wants to play the narrator says, “ I had never thought about it before, had never been forced to, but I suppose I had always put jazz musicians in a class with what Daddy called ‘good-time people’.” This quote shows that the narrator believed that jazz music was a representation of the sin going on in the world and the evil it leads to. To Isabel and her parents, Sonny’s music represented the nuisance he was while living with them. The parents were especially affected by this because Sonny was not just a burden to them but his brother, who they did not like, married Isabel. Isabel and her parents’ feelings became evident when the school system sent a note home saying that had been missing school. When the mother was yelling at Sonny she told him, “ What sacrifices they(Isabel’s parents) were making to give Sonny a decent home and how little he appreciated it,” which shows the frustration and stress that had been building up while he was living with them.
In the beginning of the story, the narrator did believe that music, especially jazz music, was associated with the evil and sin in the world.

However, throughout the story the narrator’s thoughts on the music begin to shift to a more positive view. As Sonny explains the ways of coping to the narrator, the narrator begins to understand why Sonny needs music in his life and during Sonny’s performance fully understands the meaning of music in Sonny and his life. The narrator has flashbacks of his life and the feelings that were associated with those events while he listens to Sonny’s Blues and becomes aware of the struggle going on on the stage. In this event, the narrator turns from a negative view on music to an absolute positive view on the importance of music in people’s lives.
Sonny’s Blues is a story all about music and what it represents in the lives of different people. It varys from the positive view of Sonny to the negative views of Isabel and her parents. However, the narrator of the story switches from being negative to positive as he becomes more educated. These views cover how many people view music and how it differently impacts

them.