A Story I Loved: Sonny’s Blues
- Staff Writer
- Sep 12
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 2
There is a great deal I love about Sonny’s Blues. It is an oft-anthologized story, for its themes and its power, but it’s a story that for me, is miraculous, because it is where Baldwin manages to pull off a quite a few things that should be nearly impossible for a writer. Firstly, it is a portrait of grace: of a hard-bitten man who looks at his druggie brother, Sonny, and who, at the beginning, cannot feel anything but burden when looking at him. The story is very simple, really. Life happens, and Sonny, as a long-term addict and percieved societal "no-gooder", fails to fully pull himself out. Rehab can’t fix him. Nothing much can be done, it seems. He is a "lost cause"- a terribly tragic label for anything, much less a human being. But at the end of the story, Sonny plays his music for his brother, once in a jazz club, and he turns his pain into something beautiful. He does what is the meaning of all art and maybe life itself- to turn pain into something beautiful. To make the wretched worthwhile. His brother watches, and is blown away. That is the gist of the story. Such themes, when repeated so clinically and recapped, feel almost biblical in their portrayal of grace, but it’s a literary portrait that I assure you, feels remarkably hopeful and remarkably realistic. I do not believe those two words to be oxymoronic.
Secondly, there is the problem of the music. I, as a reader, think it so interesting that what the story tries to do is portray the transformative act of music through language. Baldwin has created quite a problem for himself as a writer here. He must devise a way in which he communicates to us the incredible, life-changing power of Sonny’s music without deferring to cliches, so that to a deaf audience, who cannot hear any actual music coming from the page, must still be moved. In much the same way that someone can read up on color theory all their life inside of a black-and-white room, and the moment when the door falls away, and they see the color of leaves for the first time. There is a divide between what is sensed and experienced, and what is merely intellectual. Baldwin, through language, tries to strip away the intellectual by using non-descriptive, highly metaphorical language. He says, “I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his”, how “freedom lurked around us”.
We are not there with Sonny or his brother, we can only hear the music narrated through the thoughts in his head. We can only tell the music by what it means to Sonny’s life, the impact it has made. We cannot hear the beauty of the keys or the way that “Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life”. I am a great lover of music as well as words, though not nearly as educated in the former category- and it’s true that there is something about music, just as words, but even more so, where it’s impossible to mark out clear distinguishments for the individual who is merely hearing, as opposed to the individual who is listening. Anyone can prattle on and on about crescendos and music theory and the precise chemical changes underwent in the human brain when they hear a certain pattern of notes, but it’s hard for most folk to stomach that, and I entirely understand why. The truth is that it’s a kind of magic. Music is a kind of magic and miracle, the way meaning is, the way being able to derive emotional and intelligent lessons out of anything, whether joy or happiness or grief, is on its own head, an entirely incredible experience.
It’s why I labor over the language of these stories so frequently and laboriously, if only to come a little closer to the moment where the key change hits, where something spills over from merely notes or markings or words on a page to true music, to a symphonic overflowing of the soul. It is great and tender and redemptive and entirely, entirely human. It’s what artificial intelligence will never be able to do, not in a million years, not when the mountains turn to dust or the riverbeds dry up, not when it can highlight the aforementioned sentence I have just written and label it as cliche and overwrought, not even the day when it can write a half-decent line of poetry using a perfect metaphor with strange, rare, interesting imagery. There is no feeling, there is no emotional experience laboring the work. “The man who creates the music is hearing something else”, and we all, his fellow humans, his brothers, are trying to look inside of him. The work is made meaningful precisely because the one who makes it feels. This is the empathetic bond of everyone who deals in art- in both making and loving it. Anyone who has ever watched anything- a play, a movie, listened to a song or a speech, a eulogy, a poem recitation, anything that has ever touched them deeply or moved them to tears, will know what I am referring to. We forget that the purpose is not just to be good, but it is to feel, to feel as exquisitely and humanly and just-once-in-forever as our fellow brother felt it. To not only witness Sonny’s blues, but to have them translated to us, in all of their aching beauty, the sweet pain of signs and symbols.
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