“Sonny's Blues” was first published in the Summer 1957 issue of The Partisan Review. It was collected in Going to Meet the Man (1965). It is currently most readily available in Going to Meet the Man (Vintage).

Sonny's Blues” is a story about pain—well, maybe most stories are—but “Sonny's Blues” is especially direct about it. It begins with the arrest of a younger brother for drugs, includes the death of a two-year-old daughter and the killing of an uncle, and concludes with paragraphs about what art can ever do with that. As Sonny himself says, when he hears a woman singing gospel at a street meeting, “It's repulsive to think you have to suffer that much.”

Most people read “Sonny's Blues” in college (it's in many anthologies, as it should be), but I didn't read it for the first time till I was older. I had the sense to be stunned by it and am still. By now I've written about its use of time and discussed with classes its shrewdness in point of view, and for all the times I've read it again, I've never gotten through a reading dry-eyed. It's the least dismissible story I can call to mind.

It begins with the narrator, a high-school teacher in Harlem, reading the news of his younger brother's arrest for heroin. He and Sonny, a jazz musician, have been at odds for years. “He must want to die, he's killing himself, why does he want to die?” the brother asks a neighborhood junkie who knew Sonny, and the answer is, “Don't nobody want to die, ever…. It's going to be rough on old Sonny.” “And I didn't write Sonny or send him anything for a long time,” the narrator tells us.

On h is release, Sonny stays with his brother and his family, as he settles tentatively back into the world. Watching Sonny warily, the brother leads us into scenes from earlier times. The first is his mother telling him, “Your Daddy once had a brother…. You didn't never know that, did you?” He was killed on a nighttime highway in the South by a car of drunken white men whose joking went wrong, witnessed by the father on the road.