style of performance. The blues grew out of black folk music, such as work songs, spirituals, and the field hollers of slaves. Kamien, 1988: 546
While the spiritual songs mainly feature the theme of Christianity, the blues itself may cover various themes. The lyric of the blues can be about many aspects
of life. It is said the most important thing about the blues is about the theme, but how the blues can make the musician feel better or can express their feeling.
Focused on love, sex, grueling work, and death, the lyrics of blues songs are direst and vivid yet at the same time complex
—simple-seeming often, a blues lyric expresses sorrow, anguish or outright despair. But defiant, and
unabashedly paradoxical. In the blues one can locate humiliation and prideful boasting, beaten down restraint and lusty exaggeration. One can
even speak of some blues songs as happysad. The composer‟s and the
singer‟s goal is to feel between, touched by joy and hope, by describing and working through wounded feelings and thereby gaining a measure of control
over them. Barnett, 2005: 535
D. Theoretical Framework
The theories above are used to reveal the significance of the verbal music in the story. First the general theory of verbal music is used in order to know the
description of the revival meeting and the jazz performance and the theory of how verbal music works is used to analyze the horizontal and vertical features or the
structure of each verbal music. The theory of metaphor and metonymy in structural analysis is used to identify the verbal music so that it can be compared
and to find the relationship. The last two reviews of blues-jazz music and the revival meeting are used in order to provide the basic understanding of jazz and
the revival meeting and also become a guidance.
15
CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY
A. Object of The Study
The study uses the work of fiction written by James Baldwin titled “Sonny’s
Blues ”. The story was written in 1957 and originally appeared first time on the
Partisan Review Vol.24 No.3, Summer 1957. Then, the story also reappeared in
James Baldwin stories collection book, Going To Meet The Man originally published by Dial Press in 1965. The story has been made into short drama film in
2001 directed by Gregory Scott Williams Jr. Meanwhile, the story that is used in this study is taken from Going To Meet
The Man, published in May 1995 by Vintage Book International, New York. The
story can be found in page 101 to 141. “Sonny’s Blues” is a first-person story that tells about a narrator who got his
brother, Sonny, jailed because of heroine usage. Then it is told that Sonny had a conflict with the narrator before Sonny is jailed. The conflict was mainly on the
narrator’s failure to understand Sonny’s passion in jazz music, moreover their parents already passed away so that the narrator, as the older brother, feel that he
is responsible for Sonny’s life. After Sonny is out of jail he lives with the narrator,
and from that point the relationship between this two brothers is getting better. Things change when the narrator watches a revival meeting and hears the
music in it. He feels that he sees something in music which he never pays
attention before. And when Sonny realizes this, he invites his brother to watch his performance playing jazz with his friends that night. The narrator accepts the
invitation and goes to the nightclub with Sonny. And in that time, the narrator finally sees something in music that he did not understand before. Now he feels
music and the message in it. And also he finally understands his brother better.
B. Approach of The Study
The study conducted here uses structural approach with a brief historical support. The structural approach itself based on the structuralism movement.
According to Michael Lane, structuralism approach is: a method whose primary intention is to permit the investigation beyond a
pure description of what he perceives or experiences, in the direction of the quality of rationality which underlies the social phenomena in which he is
concerned. Lane. 1970: 31 The structural approach, can be seen as an approach which focuses on an
underlying structure that occurred in a social phenomena. Therefore the main aim of the study is trying to find the structure in a literary work. Jonathan Culler in
Literary Theory also stated:
“. . .the goal was to identify the underlying structures that make it possible. . . . structuralism sought to analyse structures that operate
unconsciously structures of language, of the psyche, of society. Culler, 2000: 120
According to Robert Detweiler, there are various methods in conducting the study using structural approach:
the key concept of structuralist search for “the quality of rationality” are those on system, the signified-signifier-sign relationship, binary opposition, laws of
