Note: Special screenings of “Sinners” were held in Clarksdale this week after residents decried the lack of a movie theater. You can read more about those events here.
Blues music has long been linked to the mystical or supernatural.
After all, the seminal Blues tale is of legend Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads of U.S. Highways 49 and 61 in the Delta to be able to play a guitar like no one else.
In the movie “Sinners,” set in 1932 Clarksdale in the very Delta town where Johnson is rumored to have made that faustian bargain, those mystical connections are taken to a whole new level.
The movie is based on the believable theory that music or especially gifted musicians can conjure up magic through their performances. Surely, that theory is relatable. After all, many people have been moved spiritually by all types of music. But the movie concludes these gifted musicians can conjure up good and, yes, bad spirits from the past and the future.
In “Sinners,” Sammie, played by actor Miles Caton, who recently visited Clarksdale for a special showing of the movie, is such a talented musician that vampires are attracted to his offerings.
Yes, this is a vampire movie. On first blush, the movie may not seem all that realistic. After all, why would twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, escape the Mississippi Delta after World War I, move to Chicago and then return home in the midst of Jim Crow and the hatred and lynchings it entailed? That seems almost more unbelievable than vampires.
But the brothers referred to Chicago as Jim Crow with tall buildings, though there also was the inference that they might have returned home to try to escape from some issues they had with their employer, the Al Capone crime syndicate.
The movie is so rich with symbolism that perhaps the juke joint where Sammie, the brothers and their allies try to find safety represents their Mississippi home. And perhaps the vampires that lurked outside represent those migratory cities: rich with opportunities (as the vampires in the movie offer) but also rife with dangers. But near the end of the movie, the dangers of their Mississippi home are made clear in vivid detail.
At the heart of the multidimensional movie, which could be considered a musical, is the story of that Great Migration — the period, of course, when Africans Americans fled the nastiness of the South, taking with them the rich and unique culture of their home.
Mississippi still has the largest percentage of Black residents — about 38% — of any state. But remember, the state had a majority Black population before the Great Migration. Black Mississippians who left had an enormous influence on the rest of the nation, and Black Mississippians who stayed can be credited with helping lead a reckoning over numerous American civil rights.
That reckoning, coupled with other aspects of the Great Migration, forever changed the South, changed the north and arguably changed all the world.
An important part of that change was the expansion and the impact that the Delta Blues brought to the world. That impact was highlighted in the surprising and inspiring feel-good ending that will remain unwritten here in deference to the people who have not yet seen the movie.
Family members of “Sinners” director Ryan Coogler were part of that Great Migration. But in an interview, Coogler said he did not recognize the full extent of that impact until he started researching and making the movie.
“I found that there’s a legitimate argument to be made that the Delta Blues music is America’s most important contribution to global popular culture,” Coogler told IndieWire. “It might be America’s most important artistic contribution to humanity came out of this place, and that’s when I realized that the film had to be epic.”
And it is epic, just as the Great Migration at the heart of the movie was.
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