SOURCE: "James Baldwin's Blues and the Function of Art," in The International Fiction Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer, 1979, pp. 143-48.

In the following essay, Lobb discusses Baldwin's exploration of the nature and purpose of art.

James Baldwin's short story "Sonny's Blues," first published in 1957, has been anthologized several times since its inclusion in Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man (1965). It is a fine and immediately appealing story, but it has never received critical treatment adequate to its complexity. The best analysis—an essay by John M. Reilly [in Negro American Literature Forum, 1970]—rightly asserts the centrality of the blues in the story as a means of personal and social communication. In the last scene, Reilly sees the reconciliation of the narrator and his brother (which certainly does occur) and an affirmation of the blues as "a metaphor of Black community." But the meaning of the blues is, as I...