Sonny's Blues, James Baldwin - Sherley Anne Williams (essay date 1972)
Sherley Anne Williams (essay date 1972)
SOURCE: "The Black Musician: The Black Hero as Light Bearer," in Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature, The Dial Press, 1972, pp. 135-52.
[In the following essay, Williams analyzes the figure of the musician in African-American literature, concluding that in Baldwin's fiction it functions as "the embodiment of alienation and estrangement, which the figure of the artist becomes in much of twentieth century literature."]
The Drifters are in the fetid bosom of Manhattan
Rocking the Apollo like an exploding battleship:
The bobbing Black crowd reach long upward
The short-skirted young girls dog in the aisles . . . The Drifters are in the big Apple tonight
sing us a song . . . SANG!
When I see them strut to the foot lights, faintly
smiling amongst themselves, giving measured "cool" response
to the screaming, the...
[The entire page is 5091 words long]
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