Summary of Thorell Tsomondo’s “No Tale to Tell: ‘Sonny’s Blues’ and Waiting for the Rain” In Thorell Tsomondo’s “No Other Tale to Tell: ‘Sonny’s Blues’ and Waiting for the Rain,” Sonny the artist is a historian (Tsomondo 196). Sonny’s history is the experience of society and that of an individual (196). For Baldwin, the artist’s credibility and appeal hinge on his historical knowledge and his success as historian is dependent on his artistic skill (196). Sonny is a kind of poet-prophet committed all together to solitary and communal experience, bound at once to tradition and to change (196). Sonny’s Blues are set in the black ghetto of New York City, and tell a story of a young pianist dogged by heroin addiction and alienated from his family (196). Yet he captures and relates a people’s historical existence, leading his audience to a heightened, shared awareness of their cultural identity (196). In Sonny’s Blues, memory, the return to the past, is motivated by a sense of amassment, but by a sense of necessity (196). Baldwin like other African American writers retains a sense of the past that is acutely unstable (196). Instead of feeling animosity to the past, the African American is in search for the continuity that it can provide (197). Writers like Baldwin are concerned with the reconstruction of an individual tradition and emancipating force that is the art which they transform need into fullness (197). Sonny’s Blues is more than a presentation of a voyage or view of our coming forth (197). It’s an invitation to embark upon the journey ourselves (197). The blacks must embark again and again on the journey through difficult straits and toward an understanding of his origin (197). According to the narrator in Sonny’s Blues “while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard”