privacy.” How, the narrator wonders, did such a promising start evolve into such an emotionally devastating adulthood?

The narrative that follows is as much about the older brother’s search for an answer to that question as it is about Sonny’s descent into the world of drugs and depression. That search for meaning will involve a conversation with one of Sonny’s friends, another victim of Harlem’s poverty, depression, and drugs and an individual the narrator takes pains to point out he seriously loathes. Much to the narrator’s surprise, this interloper into one family’s crisis offers a window into a world the narrator has never understood but into which his younger brother was fully immersed.

After the two men part ways, the narrator begins a series of correspondences with now-imprisoned Sonny, and following the latter’s eventual release from jail, the two complete the process of reconciliation. It is through the series of letters and subsequent conversations and observations that the narrator, for the first time, is able to understand and appreciate the emotional damage to his brother from the latter’s need to perform music in the face of his family’s cynicism and opposition. Finally, the narrator is able to see for himself that Sonny’s contentment, his ability to enjoy life, is intricately connected to his freedom to play jazz and “the blues.”

The story’s title, to reiterate, is a play on the word “blues.” “Sonny’s Blues” refers both to the depression and descent into the hell of addiction that Sonny experiences and to the genre of music that lifts him out of that hell, if only for a while.

Sonny is a troubled soul who deeply loves music, grew up in Harlem, got involved in drugs, and ended up spending time in prison. His responsible older brother, who has become a schoolteacher with a wife and family, doesn't understand Sonny. In fact, he cuts himself off from his brother until his own daughter dies.

The older brother spends a good deal of time wishing that Sonny had lived a different kind of life, one more like his own. He sees Sonny not as a bad person, but as someone who needs to be fixed. As a math teacher with a logical mind, he hasn't paid much attention to his brother's music.

When Sonny comes out of prison and is staying with his brother, he sees him listening to and enjoying music he hears outside the window. This emboldens Sonny to ask his brother if he would like to come and hear him play in the Village. Sonny adds, "if you can stand it," suggesting that he doesn't think his brother has much patience with his music.

The brother agrees, however, and while there, suddenly understands Sonny and the way he has transformed his blues—his pain—into art. Sonny's music touches people's souls. The brother gains a new appreciation and respect for his brother, thinking,

Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others .... Then he began to make it his .... I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. 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.

Sonny is blue about life and being outcast. In this sense, "blue" means sad, unhappy, despondent. Sonny is also a musician and when he plays, he plays African American invented music, bebop jazz and the blues. In this sense, "blues" refers to a genre of music related to jazz, originating in Southern African American communities, that has a drop in pitch (called a flat or bent tone) on the 3rd, 7th, and sometimes 5th tones of a scale, known as the Blues Scale, which is a diatonic major scale.

Sonny plays the blues to help obviate, or do away with, his profound suffering caused by his position as an outcast. His brother sought to obviate his suffering, caused by belonging to a race that is outcast, by assimilating, while Sonny turned to playing the blues (music) as a record of and an outlet for his blues (feelings). It is up to the reader to decide which approach produces the least suffering.

In the title of his short story "Sonny's Blues," James Baldwin creates a double entendre: First of all, Sonny is "low"; he suffers from heroin addiction and has been arrested for possession of the drug.  He has hit the figurative "bottom" in his life and must be greatly depresssed as a result.  Adding to his woes, Sonny is alienated from his brother, who has become an algebra teacher at a high school in their old neighborhood of Harlem. Secondly, as a musician Sonny plays jazz and the "blues," a music that originated with the African-American community that expressed their sadness and melancholy; "blues" is a termed that generated from the "blue devils," a term for depression. 

It is fitting, indeed, that this double entendre also appears in the denouement of the story as Sonny plays with such melancholy emotion at the jazz club to which he has invited his brother, who, at last, comes to understand the reason why his brother Sonny has felt the blues in his soul.

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."

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.

"Sonny's Blues" refers to the the musical rendition of Sonny's personal experiences of pain and suffering.

James Baldwin's short story is itself much like a blues song in its thematic repetition of emotion and mood. One of the key scenes in this story is that of the singers in the street revival meeting to whom Sonny listens. When he returns to his brother's home across the street, Sonny remarks that the woman whom he heard singing must have deeply suffered to sing as she did. He adds,

"It's repulsive to think that you have to suffer that much."

As he confides in his brother, Sonny explains that many people use heroin "to make something real for them." He adds that there is no way not to suffer, "but you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." After he reveals more about himself to his brother, Sonny extends an invitation to the nightclub where he is going to play piano. So, the brother joins Sonny that night and sits in a dark corner as "the room began to change and tighten." As he listens to Sonny and the other musicians, the narrator realizes that the one who creates the music "is hearing something else" from those who are in the audience.

What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

As the musicians perform, Creole leads the way "wailing on the fiddle," but listening especially to Sonny because 

[He] wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water.

When a musician plays a blues song, he can improvise. The piano is an excellent instrument for such improvisation. This improvisation makes a song belong to the musician who plays it since his private expression goes into that song. Creole wants Sonny to make the song they are playing his own. Finally, Sonny takes the number they have been playing and "gets in the water" by expressing his pain and suffering in his improvisation. As he listens, Sonny's brother remarks upon "with what burning he had made it his." Now "these are Sonny's blues"; that is, the song expresses Sonny's individual sorrows, pain, and suffering.

Sonny uses the blues to soothe the suffering he feels.  Sonny feels the harshness of growing up in Harlem more intensely than his brother does. For the most part, Sonny's pain comes from the temptations in the streets of Harlem, the limited economic opportunities he has, and learning how his uncle died. At first, Sonny uses heroin to soothe his pain and gets sent to prison for using and selling it. His brother, the narrator of the story, has internalized the suffering he grew up with. Until the end of the story, the narrator doesn't understand why Sonny plays jazz or what the music does for him. The music offers Sonny freedom from his pain and suffering. When the narrator goes to hear Sonny play, he realizes that "he could help us to be free if we would just listen, that he would never be free until we did. I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth." Because Sonny is able to put his own pain and suffering into the music, the audience can feel the pain and suffering. Sonny makes it his own when he personalizes it. The narrator finally realizes the darkness that consumes his brother and appreciates the music Sonny plays to calm his suffering.

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.