Music, Addiction, and Understanding

     James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" is probably my favorite story we've read so far. It was told from the point of view of Sonny's older brother; he grew up to a be a mature and respectable math teacher, who tries to understand his younger brother Sonny, an up and coming musician who is addicted to heroin. It seems to me that that the brothers grew up leading completely different lives, and the story is told from the narrator in a way to try and relate to his younger brother. When Sonny tells the narrator that he wants to play music for a living between paragraph 110-115, he seems suprised and uneasy, worrying about Sonny and if the people he meets playing music is the wrong crowd for him. Later on in the story, the older brother asks questions to Sonny about his heroin addiction. Between paragraph 200-205, speaking of the music scene and his addiction, Sonny says, "It's not so much to play, It's to stand it, to be able to make it at all. On any level...in order to keep from shaking to pieces." As a musician myself, I can relate to what he says here. I understand all the outside pressure from yourself and others, and how a lot of musicians find a crutch in drugs or whatever else to cope. I believe here is where the narrator begins to relate to Sonny, and at the end of the story when he hears Sonny play the blues in the night club, he feels his pain and his story in his music, and it's a great analogy on the power of music and the blues on a level of understanding.