Although Baldwin would claim that he didn't ‘know anything about music’, his fiction and non-fiction is punctuated with references to the blues, gospel and jazz. There are the titles of his short stories and novels: Go Tell it on the Mountain (a nineteenth century spiritual); Just Above My Head (a spiritual that Ida sings in Another Country); If Beale Street Could Talk (a reference to the home of the blues in Memphis), his most anthologized short story, ‘Sonny's Blues’, and the play Blues for Mister Charlie to name but a few. Many of Baldwin's fictional characters are musicians, whether singers (Ida in Another Country), jazz musicians (Rufus, also in Another Country), blues musicians (Luke in the play The Amen Corner and Frank in Go Tell it on the Mountain) or gospel singers (Arthur in Just Above My Head). In Baldwin's essays, too, he frequently invokes the names of jazz musicians and female blues singers, most notably Miles Davis, Ray Charles, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.

Baldwin would claim that he wanted to write the way jazz musicians sound but his writing on music suggests that the blues, jazz and gospel was much more than just an aesthetic or narrative device. In his characterization of musicians, deployment of blues lyrics in his novels, and in his discussion of music in his non-fiction, blues, gospel and jazz become key political, cultural and even existential phenomena that are one of the cornerstones of his oeuvre. In his essay ‘The Discovery of What it Means to Be an American’, Baldwin recalls finishing Go Tell it in Switzerland in the foothills of a very different kind of mountain. Here Baldwin acknowledges his debt, not to his literary antecedents, but rather to the blues singer Bessie Smith. It was Smith's ‘tone and her cadence’ that helped him ‘dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was a pickaninny’ (CE 138). In a 1973 interview, Baldwin would also talk of how Billie Holiday ‘gave you back your experience. She refined it’, Baldwin stated, ‘and you recognized it for the first time …’ (CWJB 155).