The Role Of Music In Sonny'S Blues

Music has the ability to transcend race, age, culture, social status, etc. , and link people together. Music is the one thing that no matter where you are in the world there is a universal language of music. Beauty comes from music and it is able to break barriers, unify people, and lift people from despair. From the title to the conclusion, author James Baldwin uses the language of music as a symbol of hope, comfort, life, and redemption in his story Sonny’s Blues.

The Reader’s first experience with music is when the narrator, who is a teacher, is at school. He had just learned earlier in the day about his brother, Sonny’s, arrest for heroin. As he sat in his classroom and listened to the students in the courtyard below, he is struck for the first time by their laughter. Their laughs were not the joyous laughs you would typically expect from children, but instead were mocking and degrading in nature. The narrator begins to reflect on how the schoolboys were no different than his brother or himself had been at that age. The students too were growing up stifled by poverty, racism, and bleak futures; all becoming victims of circumstance. Above the bitter noises the narrator hears one of the boys whistling a tune “it seemed to be pouring out of him like a bird, and it sounded very cool and moving through all of the harsh, bright air, only just holding its own through all of those other sounds” (Baldwin 94). Similar to Sonny who believed he could use music to escape the racism, substance abuse, and impoverishment that plagued Harlem, this student is using music as hope for a brighter future and to drown out the dangers and despair that surrounds him.

Music is able to provide hope and comfort to characters throughout the story. Several times the theme of music seems small but holds great significance. As the narrator walks with Sonny’s friend they stop in front of a bar and he watches as the barmaid dances to the music of the jukebox. “When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore” (Baldwin 95). Here the reader can see that for the barmaid, music brings about in her the innocence and joy she had as a child. She is temporarily able to escape the reality of her hardships and environment as the music renews a sense of survival and life inside of her. Another example in which the author portrays music as a source of comfort is when Sonny’s mother is watching out the window for him. She knows he is out in the dangers and darkness of the streets and as Donald Murray points out that “there is no escape from the darkness for Sonny and his family” (Murray 2), and his mother hums an old church song to comfort her and ease her worries. After the narrator goes to the village to visit Sonny and they have a big fight in which Sonny tells the narrator to consider himself dead to him, the reader sees that the narrator uses music in the form of whistling to comfort himself and keep from crying.

One of the most significant displays of the power of music in the story is during the street revival scene. Although Sonny, the narrator, and the people that had stopped to listen, had heard the songs before, the music caused a change in the crowd. “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” (Baldwin 108). Although there was a general despair and hopelessness of the entire crowd, and none of them had ever witnessed anyone around them being saved, they all seemed to be able to find a common comfort in the music. A comfort that took them back to the innocence of their youth and that gave them all a similar dream of a better future. It is as though the music had the ability to stop time and take away the sense of doom and replace it with a brief moment of hopefulness and beauty.

Throughout Sonny’s Blues the author entwines music with life and redemption. Music is the main focus of Sonny’s life. As Donald Murray points out Sonny is a man who needed to “find his identity in a hostile society and, in a social situation that invites fatalistic compliance” (Murray 1). Music is Sonny’s way of saving himself from self-destruction. Sonny uses music as a means to escape from his emotional scars, loneliness, the despair of Harlem, and his addiction to heroin. When the narrator sensed that “Sonny was at the piano playing for his life” (Baldwin 106), he could not have been more accurate. Music gives Sonny something to live for and is the positive force in his life amongst all the negative. It is his way of leaving his world behind and connecting with others who have experienced their own desperation. When the narrator goes to the nightclub to hear Sonny play the reader once again sees the weaving of music and life. “He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own” (Baldwin 113). A musician uses music as a form of self-expression, to tell the story of their life. As the narrator watches and listens to Sonny play the piano, he experiences an epiphany of sorts. He is finally able to truly see who Sonny is and understand all that he could not understand about him before. Music at that moment becomes a language that they can both understand and connect through. Just as music redeems and gives Sonny new life, as Tackach states “the drink now glows above Sonny like the cup of trembling…becomes a symbol of the special protection that the narrator will now extend to Sonny as Sonny struggles to confront the darkness surrounding him. Hence, the narrator, too is redeemed” (Tackach 9). Music has now breathed new life into both brothers and their relationship with one another.

Sonny’s Blues is a story filled with examples of how music brings a renewed sense of hope and comfort to people’s lives. Music was not the cause of Sonny’s troubles, but the means of escaping and surviving them. Throughout the story we see how music has a positive influence on those that are longing for something to hold on to and searching for a light in the darkness.