Reread the last four paragraphs and explain the significance of the statement “Now these are Sonny’s blues.” How has Sonny made this music his own?
What will be an ideal response?
- The outer story of “Sonny’s Blues” is the title character’s rehabilitation from drug addiction, reconciliation with his estranged brother, and recognition as a jazz pianist. The final scene in the nightclub ends with a religious vision of the blues. Listening to the group leader, Creole, play, the narrator says:
He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, and it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness (par. 234).
That passage not only offers as good an explanation of the blues and jazz as one is likely to find anywhere; it speaks cogently on the purpose of all art. It is worth reading out loud in class and having students pause over it.
The final scene of “Sonny’s Blues” is set in a dark, smoky nightclub, and its lyric quality marks a noticeable shift in tone from the realistic narrative style that preceded it. As the closing episode gains force along with the music it describes, it becomes a kind of vision for the narrator. In intellectual terms (for, after all, the narrator is a reflective math teacher), the vision brings him to a deep understanding of the human importance of art and the terrible cost of its creation. In emotional terms, his comprehension of jazz is inseparable from his sudden and profound understanding of Sonny’s identity and motivations as an artist.
The blues have indeed become Sonny’s as he is finally able to use his artistic talent to give voice to his pain, thereby reaching out to his elder brother, who is grieving the death of his young daughter. This moment of connection is profoundly important to the character development for both brothers. In one sense, the whole story is a kind of blues composition, as both Sonny and his brother have “the blues.” They both have it and live it. The final image of the Scotch and milk suggest that, for the first time, the brothers will finally play the blues—in different ways—for the first time.
Unless the reader can accept the narrator’s capacity for this transforming insight, the story is flawed by the sudden change of tone at the end. Several critics have expressed their problem with the conclusion. They feel that Baldwin’s authorial voice has replaced the narrator’s. As Joseph Featherstone said in an initial review of Going to Meet the Man, the volume in which “Sonny’s Blues” first appeared:
The terms seem wrong; clearly this is not the voice of Sonny or his brother, it is the intrusive voice of Baldwin the boy preacher who has turned his back on the store front tabernacles but cannot forget the sound of angels’ wings beating around his head. (New Republic, 27 Nov. 1965, reprinted in Kenneth Kinnamon’s “Twentieth Century Views” collection, cited in “Resources” below.)
On one level, Featherstone’s criticism makes sense. The tone of the final scene is elevated and religious. It is quite unlike the narrator’s opening voice. However, a reader wrapped up in the power of the final scene is entitled to respond that the entire story up until then exists to justify this passage. “Sonny’s Blues” is not merely the story of the narrator’s experiences; it is the tale of his inner transformation. The final scene is the demonstration of the older brother’s spiritual growth, which his earlier experiences of death and loss have motivated. In understanding and accepting Sonny, he has enlarged his soul enough to understand Sonny’s life and music, too.
Language Arts & World Languages
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