James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

A close reading of James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” that provides insight into his life and ideas about art. Tom Jenks’s reading of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” follows a scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, discussion of the pattern by which Baldwin indelibly writes “Sonny’s Blues” into the consciousness of readers. It provides ongoing observations of the aesthetics underlying the particulars of the story, with references to Edward P.
Jones (whose magnificent story “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” bears a knowing relationship to “Sonny’s Blues,”) to Charlie Parker’s music, and to Billie Holiday’s “Am I Blue?” and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” as part of the musical progression Baldwin creates, and with attention to Baldwin’s oratorical gifts and the biblical references in the story, to its time structure, characterizations, dramatic action, and, most of all, its totality of effect. Drawing on Baldwin’s book-length essay The Fire Next Time, which Baldwin published six years after the publication of the short story, Tom Jenks offers insight on some of the sources in Baldwin’s life for “Sonny’s Blues” and on the logic and passion by which life may be meaningfully transformed into art.