This genre of music became very popular in local bars. People used to go just to have the instruments, like saxophone and piano, take them away from reality even if only for a moment. In both stories the men share a common factor, they both sing the blues to release their soul from the things they are currently going through. They feel that the people they love don’t understand them and the blues is the only to get them to realize his truth. The close relation of both stories is easily from the beginning.
This happens right after he’d been watching Sonny through the window of his Harlem apartment, without the haze of his own ego getting in the way of seeing who Sonny really is. The narrator’s brother is standing at the edge of the crowd of an old-fashioned revival meeting. He sees the faintly smiling Sonny staring at the crowd making music that “seemed to soothe a poison out of them”. He observes Sonny’s walking style – something he had never paid attention to before. This scene is a turning point for the narrator, who becomes taking the observer role in the story, and for the first time of his life, starts to get to know his brother Sonny.
While others realize an inner light that will create equality with the outer darkness; their lives become a harmonious melody (2). Is there an end to suffering? This is the question that each one of the characters in the story, including the two brothers, is attempting to answer. Baldwin’s use of imagery of contrasting light and dark to show the universal suffering and its coping mechanism is one of the central themes in the story. Light, in “Sonny’s Blues,” embodies the facts of existence and realizations.
Sonny talks the narrator into seeing him play piano in a nightclub. He finally understood his brother's life through the blues that Sonny played. The narrator states “Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others”(Baldwin, 2007). It is through the energy of Sonny's blues music that the narrator's character becomes more dynamic.
The narrator wishes to keep those memories of his people alive in the form of song. One of Cane's recurring themes is the struggle to finding an appropriate language to express the world as the narrator (or perhaps Toomer) sees it. Hence, the book experiments with prose, poetry, verse and hymns. Here, however, the narrator is recognizing the use of song to communicate and keep the past alive. The opening stanza's direction to sing out into the night is something of a warning to pay homage to previous generations of slaves before they are forgotten.
John Coltrane’s ‘Blue Train’ Even if one is not a fan of Jazz or know anything about the music its self they know the name John Coltrane or simply ‘Trane’. He is not just a Jazz legend but a legend among all music styling. Coltrane was born in 1926 in North Carolina into a musical background. His dad played many instruments and taught Coltrane to play very young. He continued to play as his father had taught him until high school when Lester Young and Johnny Hodges inspired him to switch to tenor saxophone.
Another thing that makes up Marilyn’s grief history is the fact that her son and husband are never really around. I believe that the fact that her family is not spending enough time with her or the fact that she barely ever sees them will threaten to complicate her grief work. Another thing that I think can threaten to complicate her current grief work is the time between the two lost. I don’t believe that Marilyn had enough time to cope with the death of her father properly before her son passed away. Matzo noted that, “the time for grief resolution has varied from peaks at 4 months to as long as 3 years (Matzo & Sherman, 2010, p 215).
When Melissa Cooper-Prince’s eleven-year marriage suddenly ended last year, she was disillusioned, angry, and heartbroken. “I felt blindsided. I needed an emotional outlet,” so the Rockford mother began painting while her children, Hannah, 9, and Cooper, 4, were visiting their father. At first she created small, simple watercolors, but as she became more immersed in the cathartic process, she ventured into other media—as well as more technically, and emotionally, challenging compositions. Having taken only three Art and Design courses at Hope College many years ago, Cooper-Prince had limited experience as an artist, but she realized that “it was a form of therapy” as she would become lost in her art for hours and hours reflecting on her life with and without her husband.
glish Aaron Watts – Joshua Cruz English 1302 Professor Cuyler 10-8-13 Group 4 “Sonny's Blues” is a short story that was published in 1957, a time of uprising African American music such as the blues. In this story, James Baldwin presents a narrative about Sonny, a very talented piano musician who struggles with the temptations of drugs that surround the life of musicians in Harlem. In “Sonny’s Blues,” our narrator reflects on Sonny’s youth as a kid and how he would skip school to play music with all the older musicians. When Sonny’s mother confronts him about skipping school, she finds out that, “he’d been down in Greenwich Village, with musicians and other characters, in a white girls apartment” Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” Literature: Craft and Voice.
Adrian Clark English 1020 Dr. Thaddeo K. Babiiha 03-03-2013 Acceptance "Sonny Blues" by James Baldwin is about an unnamed narrator and his younger brother Sonny who goes to jail for doing drugs; when he gets out of jail he wants to become a jazz player. The narrator doesn’t understand why he wants to be one and as the story goes along the narrator understand why. They both have problems understand and accepting each other for who they are, as the story goes along they being to accept each other for who they are. As the story starts the narrator is reading a newspaper article about Sonny. The narrator states "I couldn't believe it: but what i mean by that is that i couldn't find any room for it anywhere inside me" (1762).