SOURCE: “Sonny's Bebop: Baldwin's ‘Blues Text’ as Intracultural Critique,” in African American Review, Vol. 32, No. 4, Winter, 1998, pp. 691-705.

In the following essay, Sherard traces the cultural significance of Baldwin's use of jazz music in his short story “Sonny's Blues.”

In “Baldwin, Bebop, and ‘Sonny's Blues,’” Pancho Savery argues that, “although there have been interesting analyses of ‘Sonny's Blues,’ none of them has gotten to the specificities of the music and the wider cultural implications.” As Savery points out, most of these analyses tend to focus on music as “the bridge the narrator crosses to get closer to Sonny” or to look at the blues through a somewhat superficial lens.¹ Like Savery, I believe that the “kind and form of these particular blues make all the difference” (166). The story, though titled “Sonny's Blues,” strongly supports a reading that it is jazz, and more specifically “Bebop,” that Sonny plays in...