'Sinners', Vampires, and Why It’s the Perfect Time to Amplify the Unsung Heroes of the American Blues

So, here’s the breakdown – I spent the LA heatwave watching ‘Sinners’.

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Ten years ago, I was gifted a new guitar for my birthday. When I embarked on lessons to learn how to play the intricately carved instrument, my teacher at a local music center insisted that I start with one specific lesson.

When I was 14, I learned to play a simple blues scale. Naturally, as a teenage girl in the mid 2010s, my first priority was learning my favorite Taylor Swift and One Direction songs. My instructor insisted I begin with the blues scale, saying that is “where it all begins.”

I was reminded of this moment when I sat down for a solo Los Angeles-heat-wave induced viewing of Sinners, a smash hit from director Ryan Coogler and a fresh new take on the vampire genre. The film packs in a lot – romance, history, the gangs of Chicago in the 1930s, the sharecroppers of the Mississippi Delta, Choctaw people, and yes, a jolly Irish vampire. But at its heart is the blues, serving as a through line that seamlessly and effortlessly connects it all.

The film opens with a narrator explaining the unique ancestry of the inhabitants of America’s Mississippi Delta region, and their individual beliefs surrounding the same thing – keeping an oral history alive, which both has the power to unite people and create division based on who tells the story.

The film’s opening sequence references Celtic filídh, the Choctaw Fire Keepers, and the West African Griots. The narrator then elaborates that some cultural music “can bring healing to their communities, but it also attracts evil,” and can connect with both ancestral spirits and spirits from the future (as viewers later see in a stunning surrealist montage during a pivotal scene in the film’s central juke joint).

Sinners offers a masterful use of culturally accurate mysticism for both the time period and the population of the region in which it is set. Annie (Oluwunmi Mosaku) is a Hoodoo practitioner and herbalist in an environment in which Black spirituality outside of Christianity was frowned upon by outsiders, but it ultimately saves a number of the film’s central characters in the end in different ways–much like the blues, a genre pioneered by Black artists, liberates one of the film’s characters in the end.

Sammie playing his guitar in “Sinners”

The film’s starring twins, Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan), are World War I veterans who return to the Jim Crow South after a stint working for rivaling mobs in Chicago to open a juke joint in their hometown. They are sinners in the eyes of the townspeople for their unscrupulous ways. Their younger cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) is scrutinized by his preacher father for playing Blues music, as he believes it supernatural and sinful, telling him “if you keep dancing with the devil, he’s going to follow you home.”

Sammie’s father’s statement quickly becomes a metaphor for the generational trauma of the Black American experience. While Sammie’s guitar playing may be “sinful,” his guitar becomes his anchor between the past and the present, and his ticket to freedom, despite his ability to lower the veil and accidentally attract the vampires to the juke joint.

And then, there is, of course, our vampire, Remmick. It is revealed through his musical stylings in the woods behind the juke joint (and that iconic fiddle driven performance of “The Rocky Road To Dublin”) that he is a centuries old vampire who lived through the brutal English colonization of Ireland and the introduction of Catholicism to the nation, leaving countless Celtic artifacts of folklore lost to the tides of time.

The blues music present at the heart of the film (and sprinkled in expertly through Ludwig Göransson’s score) raises an important conversation around the genre that meets the moment in the culture. The blues tell a tale of resilience and survival, but also celebration and family in wake of external oppression.

As Slim (Delroy Lindo) mentions on the drive to the juke joint with Sammie and their friend Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), “they like our blues, but not who created it.” The blues lie at the root as a foundation of the countless branches of American music to follow, and even now, many Black artists go uncredited.

Perhaps the most famous Mississippi Delta blues legend of all time, Muddy Waters, released a song in 1950 titled “Rollin’ Stone.” The track went on to inspire the Rolling Stones’ band name, Rolling Stone magazine’s name, and the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone,” a track that recently got a new lease on life from the Oscar-nominated Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” starring Timotheé Chalamet. And yet, Muddy Waters, whose real name was McKinley Morganfield, is still left out of the conversation far too often.

As of now, the only existing film that offers a glimpse into Muddy Waters’ life is the 2008 film Cadillac Records, which documented a slice of his experience in Chicago through the lens of Leonard Chess, the founder of Chess Records who played a role in the recording of blues and early electric rock n’ roll music (Chess was played by Adrien Brody, who, like the real Leonard, has Polish-Jewish heritage).

There is still yet to be a film developed surrounding Muddy Waters’ life in the Mississippi Delta, or the Black blues community that raised him. Sinners, while fictional, offers an important and rare glimpse into the Black heritage at the heart of blues music (and thus, at the heart of American music) from the eye of a Black director. Viewers leave the theater not only entertained, but educated. The film serves as a wake up call to recognize Black history and the blues at the heart of it.

Sinners made me curious about the blues, and made me want to pick up my guitar after 10 years – sometimes, the old songs are the best songs.