James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” makes the case that a modernist black musical art form, bebop, can have the same effect of catharsis on its listeners that Aristotle argues Greek tragedy has on its audience. How and why that can be is the subject of this essay. The “how” involves the narrator’s theory of music as a coherent expression of human subjectivity and an art form that, like Greek tragedy or any narrative literature, tells a story. The “how” also involves an implicit argument in “Sonny’s Blues” that black musical art forms express the personal, familial, and communal experience of African-Americans at different times in history and that as that history and the inner lives of black Americans change, so must the music be made new in order to express those changes. The “why” involves the purpose of both Greek tragedy as Aristotle describes it and of the blues, gospel, and jazz as the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” comes to see them: to transform the suffering of actual life into a work of art in which that suffering can be reflected on, understood, and made emotionally available to human compassion.