Who will save the sinner?
Author: Kyle Thompson
“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”
Romans 6:23“Neo-HooDoo believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest.”
Ishmael Reed
After watching Sinners for the first time, I left the theater awestruck by the spectacle of the story. The movie’s unapologetic soul was the root of an aesthetic embedded in the black experience and sustained by the harrowing narrative. The slaughterhouse-turned-juke joint transformed into a literal killing floor by blood-sucking vampires. The deeper conversation around the film’s metaphor, spiritual allegories, and musical impact will continue to permeate throughout the Black community, cinema, American history, and globally. There is utmost precedent to consider the implications for this movie beyond its theatrical context. This movie, as I see it, is a deeper conversation of the black psyche within the last several years, capturing folkloric history of black people. While other artists and academics have explored these narratives through the context of horror prior to the film, Sinners still provides a contribution to black thought. There are three takeaways that I’d like to provide that will contribute to future aesthetic expression in Black art.
Sinners is a distinct contribution to Blues filmography because it centers Black people, AND Black American southern traditions, beliefs, and cultures.
There are many movies that are beloved by blues enthusiasts and the general public, which show homage to the genre and those who defined it. First, we have August Wilson’s entire work of the Pittsburgh Cycle, which interweaves the blues throughout the lives of Black people in every decade of the 20th century. A recent interpretation of his work was the film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, starring the late great Chadwick Boseman. The Blues Brothers movie brought attention to a wide audience on the legends of great Black musicians who created the blueprint for American sound. Another movie is Cadillac Records tells the story of the Chess brothers and their legendary journey to create Chess Records, a label that would become home to many artists like Muddy Waters and Little Walter. The film had a star-studded cast, notably featuring the esteemed Beyoncé playing the legendary Etta James. Fictional movies like Crossroads and Black Snake Moan weave a narrative blending love, loss, and passion. Tyler Perry also wrote his own original screenplay about a Chicago jazz singer who grew up in a southern household filled with blues (conveniently titled “A Jazzman’s Blues”). Sinners contributes to the unique filmography of blues movies in that it centers an almost entirely Black cast in the backdrop of a spiritual and social climate that facilitates the story.
My takeaway: I hope that other movies will come along exploring how different cultures interweave their own folklore within the blues. It is important to show that the blues is an African American music genre beloved by the world.
2.The blues contains a folklore and history that must be understood
Sinner is a story that draws upon the supernatural, folkloric elements of Black people in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression. This narrative allows for a perspective that deliberately shifts the audience’s attention to the social conditions that impacted how Black musicians explored and made music during that era. Sinners Interplay with this history by presenting the audience with insight into the spiritual practices of Black people in Mississippi churches during the 1930s, and the folk healing practices of characters like Annie appear in the movie. There is a dynamic between the black church and secular black life that has created a sharp division between how Black people ought to live life. I asked Blues musician Bobby Rush once what the difference between gospel and blues was, and he winked and said: “The same people you see in the juke joint Saturday are the people in church Sunday”. Despite attempts by the church to divide and, in some cases, castigate altogether “worldly” music, the blues is an important art form that is meant to be understood as a shared language in the Black experience. This is captured by Black folklore songs like “Stagger Lee” and “John Henry”, which provide an oral history to a people who are made by God expressing their humanity.
My takeaway: Sinners is a sort of “folkloric artifact” that tells the story as a parable, and conversation through time between Black people now and where we existed as a people when the movie takes place. When Sammy “pierces the veil” in the juke joint, he is literally connecting to us, the audience, through time and space. These deeply powerful and important ideas to us should, in my opinion, be explored further, carefully, and deliberately to truly highlight the Black experience.
3. A sinner is a person who can be saved. But do they want to be?
There is a very strong belief that playing the blues is “Devil’s music” or that it’s “unholy”. I would argue that the blues should not be seen in such a black and white framework. An important narrative thread explored throughout Sinners is the consequences Sammy faces when he chooses to chase the blues, defying his preacher father's warnings. While he ultimately forged his own path, he ended up becoming a blues legend. Using the gifts that God gave him, he was able to make a decent living and keep alive an important tradition. Broadly, there has always been a tension between Black secular music and black religious music. While some would argue that there is a strong division between the secular life and religious life of African Americans, the lines are far more blurred in reality. It should be noted that musicians like Blind Willie Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe dedicated a substantive portion of their careers to playing gospel blues music, communicating to wide audiences the sacredness of God and the value of salvation. Similarly, artists who started out playing blues like Rube Lacy, Robert Wilkins, or Ishman Bracey eventually left behind the life of an itinerant musician to find renewal in the gospel. Then, there are artists like Son House, who spent his life inside and outside the church, rambling across America as a progenitor of the Great Migration. From a more substantive viewpoint, we see individuals like James Hal Cone crafting a theology of liberation based on how spirituals and the blues can help reveal to Black people our connection to God and innate humanity through expressing our living history. In short, the blues can be interpreted as an expression of salvation, depending on the subject matter the musician uses. Who are these people today, who play the gospel blues?
My takeaway: A movie like Sinners touches on the sacredness, spirituality, and humanity of Black people by uplifting African American folkloric traditions and musical expression intermixed with the horrors that come along with it. This begs the question: what would a story about the salvation of Black people look like?
