Discover the musical veins of James Baldwin’s 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues” as we mark the 100th anniversary of the writer and civil rights activist’s birth.
Tom Jenks reflects on some of these key musical works.
1) “Am I Blue?”
Near the end of the story, Sonny and his bandmates perform at a village nightclub. The band finishes its first set to scattered applause, and without warning the bass player begins almost sardonically playing “Am I Blue?” But why sardonically? Billie Holiday, in her 1941 performance with the Eddie Heywood Orchestra, gives a lush, touching, and romantic upbeat lift to the song’s undertow of abandonment, sorrow, and loneliness. An earlier version by Ethel Waters has a somewhat more sentimental seriocomic tone. In a film version, Waters appeared surrounded by a troupe of smiling cotton pickers with cutaway shots of a white society couple in top hat and gown looking gaily down on the scene made for their entertainment. The bass player’s sardonic touch seems to say, Enough of suffering. Listen to what we can do instead with jazz.
2) “Body and Soul”
Louis Armstrong and this jazz standard harken back to swing-based music, which a teenage Sonny calls “old-time, down home crap.” Sonny’s distaste for Armstrong can be read as a younger artist’s natural need for self-assertion and transcendence of found forms. When Sonny’s older brother testily asks who Sonny admires then, the answer is Bird—Charlie Parker—and the shift in the story from Armstrong’s music to Parker’s signals an often-painful generational struggle for freedom beyond old conventions, styles, modes, expressions, and understandings. The thread of “Sonny’s Blues” follows the fate of estranged brothers within a larger context of races divided from one another; it embodies the truth that no one of any race can be free of the effects of generations of racial oppression so long as it continues.
3) “All the Things You Are”
Charlie Parker’s discovery that the semitones of the chromatic scale can lead to any key opened greater possibilities for improvisation and carried jazz beyond Dixieland and swing into an era of modal melodies as performed by musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In idolizing Charlie Parker, Baldwin’s Sonny is not only attracted to the music but also to drugs. Sonny would have known that Parker, as a teenager already on the rise in the jazz world, was using heroin. What Sonny couldn’t have known was that Parker would die at the age of thirty-four, the erosion from drugs and alcohol overpowering his sublime gifts, and that he himself would come to understand the personal cost of addiction.
4) “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again”
One of several spiritual songs in “Sonny’s Blues,” this gospel lament celebrates a mother’s Christian virtues and her grown child’s desire for return to childhood faith. When the brothers’ mother, whose faith is deep, counsels the older brother to always be there for Sonny, she’s thinking of her sons’ mortal and immortal fate. Without a redeeming connection in this life, could there be one in the next? “But what a terrible song,” Sonny comments and laughs. His laughter sounds softer, milder, more mature than his angry teenage dismissal of Armstrong was, yet strikes further notes in a generational musical progression from spirituals to blues to jazz. Music, myth, and man are advancing together.
5) “Is That the Old Ship of Zion”
In “Sonny’s Blues,” street revivalists sing this late nineteenth-century hymn derived from earlier spiritual and gospel lyrics. The song promises that the ship will carry its voyagers over the difficult waters to a brighter destination—many a thousand will be rescued. The older brother comments that not a soul hearing this song on the street in Harlem has been rescued. The cloth of the story is woven from biblical allusion, cadence, church music, and imagery, but Baldwin poses all this in such a way that the reader can decide according to his or her own beliefs about salvation. Baldwin doesn’t insist, but his view is humanist. His concern is with the here and now. He seeks to encourage everyone’s participation and kinship in improving the quality of all lives on Earth.
6) “A Love Supreme”
To get a fully embodied sense of the musical progression embodied in “Sonny’s Blues,” a reader can listen to Billie Holiday’s “Am I Blue?” and then listen to John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” the movement from one song to the other representing a shift from sorrowing to triumph and restoration, which is what James Baldwin’s short story is about. Coltrane’s song offers thanks for his recovery from heroin addiction, while Baldwin’s story poses two brothers’ estrangement over addiction and their ultimate rapprochement as an analogy to racial division and an inspiration toward unity and love.
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