Sonny is the main character in this story, which is told by his older brother, who is saddened when Sonny is jailed after being busted for drug possession. The "Sonny" in the title therefore literally refers to the character of Sonny. But "Sonny" is also a pun on the word "sunny," which evokes bright imagery.
"Blues" is also a pun. Sonny has blues or sorrows because, despite his talents, he can't seem to get his life together or shake his drug addictions. He also has the sorrows that are inherent to being a black man in a white world, what with the legacy of slavery behind his people. However, the word "blues "also has a double meaning. It is the type of beautiful, melancholic jazz Sonny plays, which expresses the bittersweet longing of the black people and the black soul.
The title captures the paradox that the older brother tries to come to grip with: Sonny is both sunny (talented, his father's favorite, and like a "king" in his nightclub) and blue or depressed. His blues or sorrows are bad but also, as the narrator comes to understand, good or sunny: it is from his deep suffering that Sonny makes such great music. Music is his escape from the slums of Harlem, for in his club, he is in "his kingdom. It was not ever a question that his veins bore royal blood."
The title "Sonny's Blues" is an evocative one which immediately gives the story a sense of culture and place. Blues music is a genre of music born in black American communities, a development of the songs slaves would sing to keep their morale up on the plantations. As such, the word "Blues" immediately brings to mind a particular kind of misery related to the lived experiences of black people. Blues music often has lyrics discussing the particular woes of the singer or of others he has known. For this story to be called "Sonny's Blues," then, encapsulates the fact that it is concerned with the various miseries and difficulties which have befallen Sonny—and it also highlights the fact that many of these miseries and difficulties would not have happened to him if he had been a white man.
Blues music is important in this story and to Sonny, too. At the end of the story, Sonny is depicted in the only place his brother has ever seen him look at home: in a blues bar, standing in "the indigo light." While Sonny's blues, or miseries, have made his life difficult, he also finds consolation in blues music, the music of his people.
The title of this bittersweet story is a play on words by author James Baldwin . The word "blues" has two meanings. First, it refers to being down or depressed, as we say that someone has the blues. In this story, Sonny is down in many ways, with a difficult childhood, a drug addiction, an imprisonment for several years, and a brother who is...
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judgmental more often than not. Second, the word "blues" refers to a form of music, the origin of which is credited to African-Americans, whose music reflected the sadness, difficulty, andtragedy of their lives during and after slavery in the United States. The very best blues singers were African-American, people such as B.B. King and Bessie Smith, who are gone now, but there are many fine African-American blues singers alive today. Since Sonny was a musician as well, the other meaning of "blues" refers to his music and his musical talent. As the story ends, one is led to hope that the music of Sonny's blues will be enough to pull him out of his emotional blues.
Why is "Sonny's Blues" a good and effective story?
James Baldwin's story "Sonny's Blues" is a good story in part because it has multiple themes involving fraternal relationships, forgiveness, second chances, life choices, what it means to be an artist, and the positive and negative aspects of growing up in an urban area.
It is also an effective story because it spoke to the African American experience in America in the late 1950s, a time when our country's literature was far less represented by African American voices.
Baldwin is particularly effective in describing both the experience of watching jazz musicians playing together and the transcendent experience of the listener who immerses himself in the artistry of jazz improvisation. The narrator hears suggestions of struggle, memories, lamentation, and, ultimately, triumph in Sonny's playing and captures the zeitgeist of late 1950s jazz scene in New York.
Why is this story entitled "Sonny's Blues"?
James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," is entitled thusly because of its musical connection to suffering. As you know, "the blues" is the forerunner of rock and roll, jazz, and R & B (rhythm and blues). The blues are descended from gospels and slave songs. As such, they are connected to both praise and suffering, hope and despair, and--here in this story--two sides of the African-American experience.
In the story, Sonny plays "Am I Blue," and Sonny's brother, the narrator, says, "He hit something in me, myself." The music has a way of penetrating to the core. Richard Wright, a contemporary of Baldwin, says:
Blues, spirituals, and fold tales recounted from mouth to mouth...all these formed the channels through which the racial wisdom flowed.
Another contemporary Ralph Ellison agrees:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness--to finger its grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.
So, when Sonny plays the blues, his brother and all of us can feel his pain, sense his rebellion, repression, and religion, identify with his problems of substance abuse, family, work, and women--all in the notes of songs without words.