Sonny's Blues Thesis

Music is often used as an escape route into a world of belonging and expressed most passionately in the midst of oppression and injustice. Before the Civil Rights Movement, the reality for young colored men living in places like Harlem, offered mere crumbs of possibilities which led to frustration and often forced them into a state of conformity. Although in New York and other northern cities African Americans were more openly allowed to work and receive a compensation for their hard work, it was far from what they deserved and far less than what they were capable accomplishing. Their dreams were shattered when they came of age and realized their perceived inferiority in a society that made it nearly impossible for them to fulfill their childhood …show more content…
He uses words as a way to unleash himself to society the same way Sonny does with Jazz. Like Sonny, he himself was raised in Harlem and saw how many of his people “bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities” while continuously trying to dig their way out only to find themselves trapped even deeper within the grasp of disillusionment (Baldwin 42). Like many others from his community, Baldwin longed to get out of Harlem and achieve success and recognition without the shadow of his skin color dangling over his potential. Even after his achievement as a writer, Baldwin was still singled out as an African American writer, instead of just an American writer. Today, that connotation would bring pride to the community but in the 1940’s it was a mark of second-class citizenship as it denoted his inferiority to other writers. This sentiment is what drives Sonny to get away from Harlem and grasp onto Jazz so desperately that without realizing it, music swallows him entirely making it nearly impossible to distinguish the person from the sound itself (Baldwin 54). However, whether it was unknown to him at the time or he failed to acknowledge, Jazz brought him closer to the same “menace” (Baldwin 44) that he desperately tried to escape from in Harlem and ironically it gave him the same feeling of peace and belonging that music brought to him. A few years …show more content…
Sonny recognized the agony behind great music and he thought of it as “repulsive to think you have to suffer that much… to sing like that”(Baldwin 58). For Sonny, Baldwin and countless others, success was important not because of the fame that may come along with it, but because that achievement is what brought recognition of their suffering while at the same time hope for the future. Bebop Jazz was the perfect way for Sonny to stand out since this kind of Jazz “focused attention on the soloist and his technical virtuosity” giving him the spotlight to render his misery upon his audience is a majestic and entertaining way (“Sonny’s Blues” 250). At the end, Jazz offers the perfect setting that allows Sonny to connect with his brother in a way that allows him not only to be acknowledged but also allows his brother to feel the same acknowledgement of his own pain that he has vigorously tried to suppress for years (Baldwin 62). This instant was not only monumental for Sonny and his brother, but for everyone else willing to listen and acknowledge their own