What role does music play in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"?

In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," music is the central focus of Sonny's life—it is the only thing that seems to release him from his suffering: his addiction, growing up black, feeling alone and cut off from others, and a feeling that he has no one to love or understand him.

Baldwin believed in the power of art to save people from suffering, or at least to minimize their suffering.

It is not surprising that Baldwin gives Sonny's character the ability to play jazz—the blues—to better deal with his own suffering, including the awareness that he and his brother cannot communicate and therefore have no connection.

Sonny tries to verbalize to his brother just how important music is to him:

"Sometimes you'll do anything to play, even cut your mother's throat." He laughed and looked at me. "Or your brother's." Then he sobered. "Or your own."

The difficulty is that Sonny wants to make his living in a non-traditional way, one that his brother does not understand. The narrator knows nothing about jazz: he believes it is simply men sitting and fooling around with music. The narrator cannot see that it is so much more to the serious musician—and to Sonny, who has music in his soul. The narrator has been charged by his mother to care for Sonny, but he doesn't know how—certainly not in a way that will help Sonny.

Ironically, the music that Sonny's brother knows nothing about ultimately creates a bridge between the two men. And while the narrator may not completely understand jazz or the blues, while he may not know anything about the big names of this movement in music, he suddenly is able to better know his brother by seeing his connection to song.

...Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others... Then he began to make it his...it was no longer a lament...Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

Not only does the music help the narrator better know his brother, but the blues bring to him the sources of his own suffering:

I saw my mother's face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father's brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel's tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise.

Perhaps in losing his daughter, the narrator could never quite understand Sonny's suffering because it was different than his own; but Sonny's music illuminates the truth of suffering—a common feeling for a different reason. He understand life better, and death; and most certainly, he sees what a miracle music is to Sonny, and even how much it matters in his own life.

Is there an analysis focusing on Sonny's brother's life in "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin?

In "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin, the narrator is Sonny's unnamed brother.

The narrator is older, and he promised his mother before she died that he would take care of Sonny. When he insisted that Sonny would be all right, being a good boy, she tells her older son:

"It ain't a question of his being a good boy," Mama said, "nor of his having good sense. It ain't only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under."

The narrator, it turns out, is in better shape to care for Sonny than Sonny himself first because the brother has a job as a teacher of high school math—and Sonny falls prey to drugs. As the story begins, Sonny and his brother have lost touch. The narrator discovers that Sonny was arrested for dealing and using heroin; the narrator becomes scared for Sonny—he feels as if there is ice water running through his veins. This shows that though there is distance between them, the narrator still cares about his brother.

After his arrest, Sonny is put in jail; it takes a long time before the narrator finally contacts Sonny. Sonny's letter speaks of how much he needs his brother. The narrator feels guilty, and makes sure to stay connected...from then on, he writes to Sonny all the time. When Sonny is released, the narrator meets his brother when he returns to New York.

One thing that prevents the narrator from understanding Sonny has been his willingness to "kill himself" by using drugs. While there is a gap of seven years in their ages, the narrator hopes this age difference might unite them in some way. His tie to Sonny is still strong:

I was remembering, and it made it hard to catch my breath, that I had been there when he was born; and I had heard the first words he had ever spoken. When he started to walk, he walked from our mother straight to me. I caught him just before he fell when he took the first steps he ever took in this world.

In this passage, the reader hears not only the narrator's memories of a young brother, but memories that a parent would treasure of his or her child. This shows that the narrator has accepted the role his mother placed upon him years before of his brother's guardian.

The narrator does not understand Sonny's "blues." He expects that if Sonny is going to pursue music, it would be classical, but Sonny loves jazz. When he plays it, it comes from his soul. It is not until the narrator hears his brother play that he catches a glimpse of the stranger that is his younger sibling—a man the narrator has never known: 

Creole started into something else...it was Am I Blue. And, as though he commanded, Sonny began to play...they all came together again, and Sonny was part of the family again...Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played...Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life...it was no longer a lament...we could cease lamenting.

The narrator sees his brother's gift for music—how the music speaks for his brother, and how his brother speaks through the music. 

The last line of the story mentions a drink brought to Sonny's piano, and alludes to Isaiah 51:22. Baldwin writes:

...it glowed and shook above my brother's head like the very cup of trembling.

The Bible verse speaks of the end of God's anger (the "cup of trembling"), and a promise to the end of His fury...

...thou shalt no more drink it again.

We sense a relief in the narrator, a deeper understanding of Sonny, and hope for his brother's future. 

How did James Baldwin's life influence the story and characters of "Sonny's Blues"?

"Sonny's Blues" is set in Harlem, which is the place Baldwin was born. Thus, the setting Baldwin knows so well influences the plight of Sonny.

Baldwin was born to a single mother and had eight siblings follow from her later husband. He knew the pain of struggling to make ends meet, and he worked to contribute to the family's income. This sense of responsibility is seen in the way the narrator urges Sonny to be "responsible" and to choose a career that is sustainable:

"Be serious," I said.

He laughed, throwing his head back, and then looked at me. "I am serious."

"Well, then, for Christ's sake, stop kidding around and answer a serious question. I mean, do you want to be a concert pianist, you want to play classical music and all that or—or what?" Long before I finished he was laughing again. "For Christ's sake, Sonny!"

He sobered, but with difficulty. "I'm sorry. But you sound so—scared!" and he was off again.

"Well, you may think it's funny now, baby, but it's not going to be so funny when you have to make your living at it, let me tell you that." I was furious because I knew he was laughing at me and I didn't know why.

The narrator goes on to press Sonny, telling him that people can't always do what they want and that he has to finish school and think about his future. Baldwin knew well the struggle of having artistic talents (which didn't pay enough to help his family when he was a teenager) and trying to balance that desire with the reality of paying bills and surviving.

The narrator also learns that his father's brother, whom no one has ever spoken of, was killed by a carload of white men who intentionally targeted him with their car while his father witnessed the scene helplessly. This racist violence ended his uncle's life. Baldwin himself was the grandson of a slave, and by the time he was 18, Baldwin was well-acquainted with racism; he had been turned away from various establishments that prohibited blacks from entering.

The setting and struggles of the narrator and Sonny reflect Baldwin's own historical context, and threads from his own life's tapestry are woven into the details of the narrator's experience.

What is your literary analysis of "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin?

"Sonny's Blues" is, like other works by James Baldwin, an examination of the dynamic between family members in the African American community. If one is looking for a central point the author is putting forward, it would be the hopelessness that pervades some members of the community juxtaposed with the ability of others to escape this feeling and to subsume it under other aspects of life, in which even the most oppressed people create their own values and survive.

Sonny's goal is to be a musician. Yet, understandably, his progress is impeded by the usual obstacles that confront anyone who tries to make a success of himself in the arts. There is also the specter of drugs which he must overcome. His brother, who narrates the story, is sympathetic but is not really a part of the milieu to which Sonny belongs and does not have the same visceral sensitivity to racial issues Sonny has. Or, he may be in denial about them. In asking Sonny what type of music he wishes to play, his brother mentions Louis Armstrong, but this reveals that he's almost in a separate universe of thought from Sonny, who doesn't respect Armstrong and associates Armstrong with a "down home" and outdated style. When Sonny mentions Bird (Charlie Parker) as his model, his brother seems unfamiliar with Parker but says, "I'll go out and buy the cat's records." This one exchange encapsulates the central theme of Baldwin's story in which there is a dichotomy of thought and of values between two brothers. The point is that different people react in individual ways to the dynamic of their own background. Sonny is a dreamer, a man on the outside who wants to fulfill those dreams but is beset by the external world and the way it impinges upon our desires—especially in the urban African American community of the time (the 1950s and 1960s) when the Civil Rights Movement was only in its infancy.

In formulating your thesis based on these factors, if you choose, you may wish to look at other books by James Baldwin such as his novel Go Tell it on the Mountain. In this story religion to some extent plays the role music has in "Sonny's Blues," as a counter-force to the unhappiness and oppressive environment in which young African Americans are growing up. Similarly, in a novel such as Richard Wright's The Outsider (unfortunately much less read than Wright's Native Son) the title character, Cross Damon, is a man who, like Sonny, has not "found himself" and is the Other, a man at odds with the normal expectations of establishing a secure working life for himself, raising a family, and so on. In "Sonny's Blues," Sonny's brother has achieved this "normal" goal, while Sonny remains an outsider attempting to follow his own path against the odds.