SOURCE: "Baldwin, Bebop, and 'Sonny's Blues'," in Understanding Others: Cultural and Cross-Cultural Studies and the Teaching of Literature, edited by Joseph Trimmer and Tilly Warnock, National Council of Teachers of English, 1992, pp. 165-76.

In the following essay, Savery places Baldwin's treatment of music within its historical and cultural context.

Well before James Baldwin died in 1987, the literary critical establishment had made up its mind about him. Thus, there was hardly any surprise when Lee A. Daniels's front page New York Times obituary lauded, "James Baldwin, Eloquent Essayist In Behalf of Civil Rights, Is Dead." Equally unsurprising was Mark Feeney's Boston Globe "Appreciation" entitled "A Forceful Voice on the Issue of Race." What James Baldwin had become was, to a large extent, black America's interpreter of black America to and for white America. As such, Baldwin was essentially mummified into the "Voice of the Civil Rights Movement," a historical...