Warning: This essay contains spoilers for the film Sinners.
There's a song written by the jazz singer Billy Eckstine with Sid Kuller called "Blues, the Mother of Sin" that has always been instructive to how I think about the blues and its singular dogma. By that point in its layered entanglement with spirituals, the music had built up a reputation as sacrilegious — but this song seems to recognize it as a counterbalance, a down-to-earth reply to the gospel of the Most High. Performed by Eckstine with pianist Count Basie in 1959, and then again by Mark Murphy for 1963's That's How I Love the Blues!, its lyrics seem to lean into anti-secular reprimand: "You were born in a dive / And weaned on misery / Then you put down some jive / And crashed society," the performer exclaims, always accentuating the crash. Blues, the message goes, is a force bred of blasphemy, the godless music of boozing and fornication and infidelity. It has made people grieve since Adam and Eve, and it gets under your skin. Except, in just about every iteration, the voice betrays the lyrics: The performances are always a bit cheeky, as if winking at the audience. It's the way they tug on the words pleasure and pain, the duality, key tenets of the human experience. The song isn't arguing for sin, but for its inescapability. And the blues, in its paternalistic relationship with sin, may by extension be something the culture can't live without.
Writer and director Ryan Coogler's new period drama Sinners is a blues movie that understands this inherently. While operating on many levels — as a reimagining of the Southern Gothic vampire story à la Anne Rice's novel Interview with a Vampire or the HBO series True Blood, and as a sendup of the horror genre that conceptualizes the terrors of the Jim Crow South's social construction as a figurative sundown town — the film, set in 1932, revolves primarily around ideas of Black spirituality and the music's place in the Mississippi Delta community's evaluations of righteousness and iniquity. There are references to Black Christianity and Hoodoo, piety and profanity, and music functions as a turn toward both salvation and damnation. The agnostic but faith-appreciating narrative plays into this duality from its opening seconds: "There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future," a voice-over explains. "This gift can bring healing to their communities, but it also attracts evil."
Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan as the twins Smoke and Stack, who have returned to Clarksdale, Miss., intent on opening a juke joint after working for (and ripping off) Al Capone's Chicago Outfit. Their cousin Sammie, a pastor's son known as Preacher Boy (played by newcomer Miles Caton), is an aspiring musician; his father warns that the blues is supernatural, but the boy is set on leaving town and pursuing a career as a singer and guitarist. The would-be bluesman tags along as the twins split up and ride around Clarksdale, a hometown from which they are notably estranged, setting up for the juke in a sawmill purchased from a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Their stable of hired hands and patrons includes Smoke's wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku); Stack's white-passing ex-lover Mary (Hailee Steinfeld); Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a married singer whom Sammie pines after; the busker Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo); the field hand turned bouncer Cornbread (Omar Miller); and the married shopkeepers Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao).
As Clarksdale's Black community gathers to drink and dance away their troubles, the historical fiction whiplashes into paranormal horror nearby. With the setting sun, we are introduced to a daylight-seared creature of the night, the Irish vampire Remmick (Jack O'Connell). On the run from Choctaw demon slayers, Remmick finds sanctuary with a Klan-aligned married couple, and rewards their hospitality with a gory home invasion that makes them blood of his blood. When the music of the juke draws Remmick's attention, he sets upon the party with his newly made progeny in pursuit of Sammie, whose singing and playing possess a mystic gift. Remmick's interest in Sammie flows directly from the power of his music: The vampire is called to it as a preternatural force that allows him to see across the threshold, to commune with the souls of his lost friends. Those he turns are part of a hive mind he controls, and he plans to remake Sammie in his image, taking the power for himself.
The movie steadily crescendos to a crucial performance scene in the twins' venue. When Sammie unveils his talent before the crowd, playing "I Lied to You," a song he wrote for his father about loving the blues, the room erupts. But what begins as a faithful rendition of '30s blues and the juke culture erected around it slowly and wondrously bends beyond normal space-time. Suddenly the dance floor is shared by performers from the past and future, not just the griots from across cultures mentioned in the opening voice-over but others more recognizable to us in the audience, rock stars and rappers. The sawmill appears to catch fire, and as the song grows bigger and more intense, the walls burn away. "I Lied to You" shifts, too, from classic blues to something harder to define, encompassing '80s hip-hop breakbeats and turntablism, Hendrix-esque electric blues, the funky worm and djembe drumming, before mutating Sammie's wail into auto-tuned garbles evoking everything from Roger Troutman talk box to Kanye West's "Blood on the Leaves." Blues isn't simply the mother of sin; it is a nexus point along the continuum of Black music, birthing so many modern forms.
"The blues are the roots of all American music," Willie Dixon, who knew a thing or two about trading in Mississippi gospel for Chicago blues, once said. "As long as American music survives, so will the blues." You can read the throughline of Sinners — in which Sammie, the lone human survivor of Remmick's vampire horde, abandons his father's church to play blues in Chicago despite the horrors it brings to the juke — as not just a rejection of religiosity but an embrace of the blues' sorcery, and its continuance as a sort of cultural necessity honoring the sacrifices that sustain the music. Yet as Amiri Baraka tells us, writing as Leroi Jones in the book Black Music, "To go back in any historical (or emotional) line of ascent in Black music leads us inevitably to religion, i.e., spirit worship. The phenomenon is always at the root in Black art, the worship of spirit — or at least the summoning of or by such a force." Sammie's embrace of blues isn't an either/or proposition; his blues is bonded to his Preacher Boy essence. Baraka noted that the "song quality" of blues was the deepest memory, one pulling from a particularly racial reinterpretation of history and religious zeal carried throughout generations, across continents and cultures, as a folklore of echoes. "The God spoken about in the Black songs is not the same as in the white. Though the words may look the same … it is a different quality of energy they summon," he wrote. Sammie's performance, and the way it unfolds in the film through magical realism, feels like corroboration of that blurred memory, which spirals through time in the viewer's perspective, musically but also spiritually. "I'm full of blues," he sings in "I Lied to You." "Holy water too."
The theologian James H. Cone, who wrote extensively about the relationship between gospel and the blues, once saying that neither was an adequate interpretation of Black life without the other, unpacked the friction innate to the experience Sammie has in Sinners. "While seculars were not strictly atheistic as defined by modern Western philosophy, they nonetheless uncover the difficulties Black people encountered when they attempted to relate white Christian categories to their situation of oppression," he wrote in the 1991 book The Spirituals and The Blues. "The blues reflect the same existential tension. … Implied in the blues is a stubborn refusal to go beyond the existential problem and substitute otherworldly answers. It is not that the blues reject God; rather, they ignore God by embracing the joys and sorrows of life, such as those of a man's relationship with his woman, a woman with her man." Those joys and sorrows spill out across the juke — in Sammie's adulterous entanglement with Pearline, in Stack's complicated (also adulterous) romance with Mary, and in the tragic deterioration of Smoke and Annie's marriage after the death of their infant child. The respective embrace of those swirling emotional intoxicants is only enhanced by how little time they have, how short the night is — for many it is literally their last — and how the day promises to resurface all of the harsh realities of the outside world. "Lawd away until the sun does rise," Pearline sings on the Brittany Howard-penned "Pale, Pale Moon." God is present — he is simply out of reach. The juke is depicted as lively and liberatory, the church staid and constrictive. Though all the problems still follow them in, there is solace to be found at the barrelhouse, however briefly.
As a secular music with non-religious and sometimes even anti-religious leanings, the blues was often referred to as the devil's music by Black evangelists, and some blues musicians played into this perceived social war with the church. The devil is a recurring figure in many songs, his influence a precursor to sin on recordings like Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman" or Otis Spann's "It Must Have Been the Devil." Sometimes blues is even a hero's reward, claimed in a Faustian bargain. Sammie and his father (played by the poet and musician Saul Williams) wrestle with this reality, as the boy finds blues and its culture of sin as a kind of momentary emancipation from Jim Crow's pervasive restrictions, while the pastor sees them as merely another threat to community building. The music does attract undead demons that wreak havoc on their little hamlet, but in Sammie's moment of greatest peril, prayer doesn't save him either. Both are portrayed merely as means to navigate Black struggle, and as nourishment for the soul. That Remmick recognizes the value in the blues doesn't make it unholy. If anything, the vampire seems to represent the parasitism that is appropriation.
In Sinners, vampires are the ultimate culture vultures, with the "soul" in soul music stemming from both an urgency to Black American life — its tribulations and sequestered community — and its inherent spirituality, an ethos extending across eras. Remmick longs to tap into those energy sources, the summoning of spirit Baraka wrote of, and it's his desire to simply steal it that makes him a villain. You can find a clear overlap between blues and the hip-hop evoked by "I Lied to You": Like its ancestor, rap transmuted the ugliness of Black struggle into cool. Both, in their time, fell prey to respectability politics, and were rejected as wicked for embracing frankness to the point of being profane. But they are simply true, so true it can seem like they pierce the veil. They draw upon the same soul, and are constantly under threat from interlopers trying to siphon off that cool without tapping into the racial memory.
"I Lied to You" and Sammie's performance at the juke made me think of Tonky, the most recent album by the experimental artist Lonnie Holley. Born in Alabama in 1950 as the seventh child of 27, Holley knows the blues well — not simply the music, but the spirit and sorrow that conjure it. His life sounds like the troublin' songs Billy Eckstine sang of: He was traded for a bottle of whiskey as a child, abused by his guardian and homeless for long stretches. Holley was hit by a car as a teenager and pronounced brain-dead, and after inexplicably recovering, he was sent to the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs, where he was forced to pick cotton. At the fairground where he grew up, he was nicknamed Tonky for the honky-tonk where regulars would throw quarters to see him dance. "I was wild as could be, living in the hustle and bustle of humans trying to find fun like looking for a needle in a haystack," he told Crack magazine. "All my albums are about trying to find that fun and meaning — recycling our trash and debris, the words and thoughts of my mind, into something beautiful."
Tonky is deeply and painfully aware of racial memory, and of that memory's function in spirit worship — not just in the religious sense, but in the ancestral one. "Oh I wish that I could rob my memory," Holley sings on opener "Seeds." "I'd be like Midas and turn my thoughts to gold / And one day end up just being all right." He draws on his own past, but also the Middle Passage, journeying through memory all the way back to Africa. Sometimes he sings, sometimes he chants. Produced alongside the Irish musician Jacknife Lee, the music is roughly blues, but it is in constant conversation with hip-hop. ("I am the living example of the blues in America," Holley once said, adding, "The Spirit gave me the power to do all this. I got my relatives' mojo workin' in me.") Saul Williams, Open Mike Eagle and billy woods all make appearances. There is a sense throughout that blues and rap aren't just companions but kin, and they share a responsibility to sin and the soul alike. "The burdens is like a spell that has been cast upon you / Burdens of our ancestors / Left for us to unravel and clearify in history," Holley chants on "The Burden (I Turned Nothing Into Something)." It is a defining principle for this kind of exercise: The price of the music's gripping soul is its responsibility to carry the burden.
A post-credits scene set in the '90s finds Sammie (now played by the Chicago blues guitarist Buddy Guy) performing his music in the Windy City, his face marked by a scar Remmick left him. It is there that Sinners reveals Stack and Mary, who became vampires the night of the juke, survived the melee, and have lived together ever since, breaking free of the racial restrictions of their lives as humans under Jim Crow. The cousins, briefly reuniting, share a moment as Sammie plays "Travelin'," the song he debuted for Stack when the latter first returned to Clarksdale. Before the vamps leave, Sammie tells Stack that that fateful day, before the mayhem began, was the best one of his life. Stack agrees, saying that, for a time, they were free. They part knowing it's the last time.
I am conflicted about the reunion. It undermines the actual ending some — one where Smoke, fatally wounded in an early-morning ambush by the same Klansman who signed over the mill, seems to move beyond the veil, reconnecting with the spirits of Annie and their child in the daylight. Taken individually, either conclusion might work. Together they lead to clashing interpretations of the legacy of that night, the value of life and death and the preservation of soul. But in another sense, the flash-forward feels crucial to Sammie's story. In his commitment to the blues, you can read the music as an urtext for Black American memoir, one that must carry on come hell or high water. Inscribed in its everlasting songs are not just a historic memory maintained across time, but an homage to the sins of the past.
Copyright 2025 NPR
