Directions: 1) Read "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin.
2) Next, compose a thoughtful blog post using evidence from the text and anything from the documentary I am Not Your Negro (2017) in an attempt to explore one of the complex issues Baldwin examined in his discussion of race in America. Be okay with feeling uncomfortable. Ask questions. Look for feedback. Also, practice kindness. We can discuss these matters with passion AND civility.
3) Also, peruse the additional materials, including the musicians referenced in the short story: Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong, along with a list of influential artists I love from the past and present. Comment on one that resonated with you in your blog post.
I Am Not Your Negro (2017)
The first-person narrator of "Sonny's Blues" tells the story of his relationship with his younger brother, Sonny. The story begins with narrator, saddened by his brother's choices, reflecting back on their childhood, wondering what caused his brother to become an addict. How does Baldwin use jazz as a means of discussing the complex emotions of his characters? This is the most anthologized of Baldwin's stories. However, how would this story end up perpetuating "the danger of the single story?"
Article: “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin —“The most famous jazz short story ever written”
December 6th, 2013, from Jerry Jazz Musician
In the introduction to The Jazz Fiction Anthology, editors Sascha Feinstein and David Rife cite James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” as “the most famous jazz short story ever written,” and is pointed to by Baldwin biographer David Leeming as “the prologue to a dominant fictional motif in the overall Baldwin story, the relationship between two brothers that takes much of its energy from the close relationship between James and [brother] David Baldwin.” The story, originally published in Partisan Review in 1957, centers on the narrator’s need to, in Leeming’s words, “save his brother [Sonny] from the precariousness of his life as an artist.” Sonny, in turn, finds his voice by playing bebop in the Village, which results, according to Leeming, in the narrator seeing “that the artist, especially the black artist, is a prophet of freedom, not only of freedom for his own race but of freedom for all those suffocating under the repressive blanket of emotional safety and innocence.”
