Peek-a-boo, The Blues Live On In Ryan Coogler’s Sinners

The film also considers the meaning of having the blues, who has them, and what has become of the blues. The inception, need, and continuation of the blues lay at many ethnic, cultural, and temporal crossroads.

“Peek-a-boo”, in the words of Kendrick Lamar. Peek-a-boo, they tried to kill the blues. Peek-a-boo, they had to stand on “Got My Mojo Working” like Muddy Waters calls over electric wails. Peek-a-boo, Ryan’s Coogler’s Sinners is letting everybody know that the blues live on like clouds reigning in the sky.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a ride on a fright train through the Southern-born riffs that reverberated the walls of juke joints—where bluesmen and women could lay their burdens down. Of juke joints, Amiri Baraka writes in his 1963 book, Blues People: “The leisure that could be extracted from even the most desolate sharecropper’s shack in Mississippi was a novelty, and it served as an important catalyst for the next form the blues took.” In the film, Smoke and Stack, twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan, perform a reverse migration that is as grim as hopes and freedoms deferred in The Great Migration, when many fled to cities like Chicago. In October of 1932, Smoke and Stack make the trip back from Chicago, Illinois to Clarksdale, Mississippi down the mainline that the Pullman Porters used to transport the news. Smoke and Stack’s trip is a strange fruit like Billie Holiday warnings, however. They are on a journey to redress the wounds of the past by turning a sawmill that was considered a slaughterhouse into a juke joint.

The Mississippi cottonfields, and, specifically, the Sunflower Plantation are an appropriate staging for redress, as the pastoral has been a grounds for repression, as explored in Professor and Black Studies scholar Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America. Hartman writes about the need for redressing pain of captivity: “This pain might best be described as the history that hurts—the still unfolding narrative of captivity, dispossession, and domination that engenders the black subject in the Americas.” Hartman, emphasizes that redress was sought through Black practice and performance, rooted in pleasure. Deemed socially dead, the enslaved alleviated the “pained state of the captive body” through practice and performance. The enslaved did so with acknowledgment that the conditions may not change—not in resignation—but with full understanding of the scope of domination, according to Hartman. The power of the performative, according to Hartman, is that it provides “context for the collective enunciation of pain.”   

Bluesman, Sammie Moore (Miles Caton), wants alleviation from the pain so bad. As a sharecropper, that pain is an unescapable feeling that he can only shake in the blue notes on his acoustic guitar and among other bluesmen and women. Sammie’s escape is in the tradition of sharecroppers and slaves who worked in the cottonfields. Blues has roots in the work songs and negro spirituals those enslaved sung, writes scholar Sterling Brown in “Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work Songs" (1953). Brown traces the roots of the blues to negro spirituals, work songs, folk ballads, and folk seculars and highlights how blues aesthetics have articulated the state of Black life in slavery, post-emancipation in the fields. Sammie knows that the freedom in the chord progressions and vocalizing is temporary. Redress through the blues is limited. The collective need is liberation from oppressive systems, but his blues is that temporary relief that momentarily stops time and connects Sammie to an otherwise.

In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis explains that post slavery blues expressed new individual needs and desires that couldn’t be expressed during slavery. According to Davis, blues expression was now both a sacred and secular Black mainstream music, while the negro spirituals were placed into religious settings. In Sinners blues is a technology and cultural matrix, as Houston A. Baker asserts in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. It is a technology often relegated to the past in the modern zeitgeist. Yet, in the film, the blues is a catalyst that is not stagnant, linear, nor monolithic; it transcends time, gender, geography, musical genre, and more. It transports. Breakers break the blues. Turntablists mix and scratch the blues. Rockers thrash the blues. The blues allow emcees to spit rhymes. Delta Slim, portrayed by Delroy Lindo, was willing to die by these blues.

Through the blues, Sinners shows an otherwise by examining Indigeneity; it explores Indigenous ways forgotten or lost due to colonialism and the impact of such loss. Early on, the Choctaw tribe conflicts with Remmick (Jack O'Connell). The Choctaw leader, Chayton (Nathaniel Arcand), offers a solution to stop Remmick from spreading his evil. The Choctaw leaders are ignored, and their solution was ultimately never incorporated. The evil is then able to spread and engulf anyone and anything: the Chinese store owners Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) and Bo Chow (Yao), Stack, Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), the juke joint, and more. The evil could overtake it all, but not for the rootwork that Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) uses that is passed down through her grandmother. Sammie has the church. But he is at odds with the Christian religion that rejects blues and Annie’s rootwork that provides the mojo to keep Smoke safe from harm. The blues, often referred to as the “devil’s music”, isn’t welcome in the church. Sammie’s father and the pastor of the church (Saul Williams), warns him about these evils of the world. One of the evils being the blues, the soundtrack of the juke joints, pleasures, sexuality, whiskey-dranking, gambling, and other unruly exploits. Remmick also expresses regret of Irish ways lost due to Christianity and colonialism. The freedom Sammie seeks can’t be contained or obtained through going to church.

The film also considers the meaning of having the blues, who has them, and what has become of the blues. The inception, need, and continuation of the blues lay at many ethnic, cultural, and temporal crossroads. The opening of Sinners establishes that the tale takes place on Choctaw land, even before revealing Clarksdale, Mississippi and Sunflower Plantation as locations in the story.  In Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music (2009), John Troutman writes in the perils of the Dawes Act of 1887, musical practice for native people performed a sort of citizenship and reformation work. In The Guitar and the New World: A Fugitive History, Joe Gioia makes a geographical case for Black and Native roots of the blues because of the social conditions of slavery and land possession that led Black and Native people’s paths to intertwine and intersect. The film, “Rumble,” features Ulali, an acapella, gospel group made up of Native women from North Carolina. In the film, a member of Ulali listens to Charley Patton on a vinyl record, and says she hears Native vocalizing in his voice. Charley Patton, said to be the original owner of Sammie’s guitar, is often referred to as the “King of Delta Blues”.

Sinners is ultimately another plea in keeping this technology, the blues, alive. Like the blues, the film’s ending is bitter-sweet because the problems introduced in the film, and currently unfolding in the world, are unresolved, compounded, and ongoing. The film reiterates the unfortunate need to “…be free of all of this for a day” as Sammie tells his father in the film. Black women and men are free in the worlds that the blues affords: we can exist temporarily beyond the mythical and nonhuman status created at our arrival as slaves in the United States, that Hortense Spillers examines in her 1987 book Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Sinners is a message for those who may think that the blues are dead, dying, or no longer a Black technology. Buddy Guy, the tired but resolved 1990s version of Sammie Moore in the film and Clarksdale’s own, Christone "KINGFISH" Ingram, who plays guitar beside him on stage, wail otherwise on their guitars. The blues are very much alive and well. In Kendrick Lamar’s refrain, “What they talkin' 'bout? They ain't talkin' 'bout nothin'…Peek-a-boo”.