When we read these stories by Hughes, and Baldwin, we're reading into a mood caused by some situation the character experiences. As the reader we're sucked into the dimness of the characters soul and the manner in which they use the blues not to necessarily overcome but to cope with their sadness or disposition. If you sit back and imagine a blues rhyme echoing in your head, the sharp almost whinny notes of the horn lighten by the leisurely strokes on the ivory keys of a piano and the cool reiterated beat on a snare drum, you can feel a warmth inside you that pushes your troubles away; a perfect ecstasy. And as your sitting relaxed in your chair letting the warm fabrics caress your un-tighten body no thoughts of negativity can enter your head, only thought of how amazingly awesome you feel in this particular chair in this particular corner of time. Hughes wrote, "While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that's dead." This "Negro" playing the blues on his "ivory keys" was killing his feelings of not being able to be satisfied, happy and wish he was dead. "When the singer stopped playing and went to bed," he left his ill-fated thoughts and slept with no worries and was cradled and sheltered mentally and physically by his beloved blues.
             Like the tool the "Negro" used to play his problems to easy, Sonny needed the aid of something more than just a physical downer, his heroin, but a spiritual quencher that would saturate his addiction as-well. Sonny could escape his reality with heroin but sobriety always resurfaces and he uses music to escape, to run ahead of the despair. The difference between Sonny and the "Negro" is Sonny wasn't fully satisfied with just the music, he used to music to over come his dependency where the "Negro" used his music to wipe his conscious. Not only this, Sonny played jazz; Sonny pushed...