JAMES BALDWIN, “Sonny’s Blues”: Rapture and the Ambient Menace

This week’s episode will be focusing on “Sonny’s Blues”, one of my favorite short stories of all time, by James Baldwin. The story is set in 1950s New York between Harlem and Greenwich Village and turns on the relationship between two brothers seven years apart. It is told from the older brother’s first-person perspective and is a series of memories couched as the difficult relationship between the two brothers. The older brother and narrator remains unnamed throughout. He is an algebra teacher at a school in Harlem, and we see that he has shaped his life around certain life choices that give him respectability as a Black man and thus some measure of protection from the ambient menace that surrounds the lives of all Black folk in the period. This is in contrast to his brother, who simply wants to be a jazz pianist and also has a heroin problem. But the contrast between the two brothers is not that straightforward, as we quickly find out. The story puts in circulation subtle ideas about the relationship between darkness and light, hearing and listening, and Black creativity and history that all come together in an exquisite scene at a night club where the older brother goes to see Sonny play with a blues band in a club in Greenwich Village at the end of the story. We will see how Baldwin builds up a structure of subtle incremental repetitions of various images and echoes into a mighty crescendo of insight, humanism, and the affirmations of jazz’s transcendent value as a bearer and witness of matters pertaining to Black life.
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Suggested Reading
Michele Elam, The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Eddie S. Glaude, Jnr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, (New York: Crown, 2020).
James Baldwin and Raoul Peck, I am Not Your Negro, (New York: Vintage International, 2017). Based on the film I am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck, 2016.
Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow, Of Latitudes Unknown: James Baldwin’s Radical Imagination, (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
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Suggested videos
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
What is Urban Studies?
What is Postcolonialism?

[@gregorygraham4233]

Thank you. Exquisite summary and related elements from the beginning to the ending of the story.

[@GuerillaWelder]

I came across your channel looking for insight in "waiting for the Barbarians" and you answered the question I was struggling with. I really enjoy your dialogue and the tenor of your voice. Thank you for giving the gift of your knowledge and interests to us.

[@tootscarlson]

Fantastic book; love Coetzee. How did you like it?

[@GuerillaWelder]

@@tootscarlson im working my way through McCarthy first lol but coetzee is a literary mountain with climbing for sure

[@gladysagyeiwaadenkyi-manie38]

Your countenance alone, Prof. Thank you.

[@CriticReadingWriting]

You are very welcome

[@naimarachid9035]

Thanks so much for your effort.

[@CriticReadingWriting]

My pleasure!

[@ralphellectual6975]

I know many of Baldwin's novels, plays, and essays, but somehow I missed this story. I think of the differences and similarities between this story as described and GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN and THE AMEN CORNER. Brothers play a role in the former, escaping the church and the ghetto via music concludes the latter. The painful life conditions are intense in all three works; "Sonny's Blues" seems to be configured differently, though; perhaps it is the next step. I can't tell if Baldwin's negative assessment of the Black church in the two novels continues in this story. By this time, if I remember correctly, Baldwin had made in an essay his rejection of Christianity explicit. Jazz is the resolution of the needs of the self via autonomy, beyond the rigidity of social position and formulaic tradition, revisiting the past, recognizing its sufferings, and freeing the mind from it.

[@CriticReadingWriting]

Hi Ralph, "Sonny's Blues" does not reference the church, except with reference to a group of siblings singing church tunes on a Harlem street and collecting contributions. But that scene definitely does not act as the emotional anchor of the story. So yes, this one is configured quire differently.

[@sachinsharma7289]

I wonder if you could tell me what literary theory is used in this interpretation.