“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it,” James Baldwin wrote in Sonny’s Blues. “And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.”
The novelist was a music fan, and Hammer Museum curator Ikechúkwú Casmir Onyewuenyi decided to create a Spotify playlist of his epic record collection, Hyperallergic reports.
The playlist is composed of 484 songs and lasts 32 hours. Onyewuenyi based the playlist on photos of Baldwin’s collection of albums that he found posted online by the nonprofit organization La Maison Baldwin.
“Looking over pictures of Baldwin’s house in Provence, I latched onto his records, their sonic ambiance, as a way to fill the space but still allow room for this emptiness, for differences,” Onyewuenyi said. “In addition to reading the books and essays he produced while living in Provence, listening to the records was something that could transport me there.”
The playlist begins with jazz singer Gloria Lynne’s 1960 album Try a Little Tenderness, then segues into albums by Aretha Franklin, Randy Crawford, and Diana Ross. Other musicians represented include Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Patti LaBelle, Sarah Vaughan, and Frank Sinatra.
For Baldwin fans who still can’t get enough, the Swedish cultural center Clandestino Institut also has a Spotify playlist of songs by musicians mentioned by Baldwin in his works. It features tracks by Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Fats Waller, and more.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
