Sonny's Blues, By James Baldwin

“Jazz is a complete lifestyle, something that you feel, something that you live.” (Ray Brown). In his short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin tells the story of a young jazz musician, and tries to capture the lifestyle described by jazz bassist Ray Brown in his character Sonny. Baldwin constantly limits the potential of Sonny as a character by placing him in situations that defy his personality, but make him a believable character because they are similar to experience of actual jazz musicians.

One trait Baldwin gives to Sonny is service in the military, this acts as a foil to Sonny’s choice of career as a jazz musician. Sonny joined the military in order to use the G.I. bill to obtain a musical education following his service (Baldwin 108). The military creates an image of uniform and strict adherence to rules and regulations. Jazz, on the other hand, defies many of the set rules of music. It has a free-flowing structure that allows for improvisation and artistic liberties to be taken on the work of

From prison Sonny writes to his brother trying to explain somewhat why he is there, he says, “I guess I was afraid of something or I was trying to escape from something,” (Baldwin 100). The lifestyle jazz represented was one of liberation, it grew from African-American culture following the civil war. Sonny’s being incarcerated counters the idea of liberation that jazz represented to the African-American people. Sonny’s being arrested creates similarities to him and another jazz musician, Sonny Rollins. “While Rollins' career track was on the rise, his personal life was sadly, slowly taken over by heroin, with his first drug possession arrest coming in 1950” (Murphy). Both Sonny and Rollins were arrested mid-career for possession of heroin, and in similar ways they both were rehabilitated and came back onto the scene and eventually showed potential as musicians following their