'Sinners' summons the demons of American music

Deconstructing Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Göransson's vampire blues musical

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Ryan Coogler's Sinners has haunted us for weeks. While disguised as a vampire horror movie, it's covertly advancing one of the most radical arguments about American musical history we've encountered. Through its blood-soaked narrative, Sinners challenges everything we think we know about musical genres, racial identity in music, and the living legacy of the blues. Coogler has essentially created a musicologist's wildest fantasy and smuggled it into theaters as a vampire flick.

The Sound of Mississippi Delta Blues

The film opens in 1930s Mississippi, where twin brothers Smoke and Stack (named after "Smokestack Lightning" made famous by Howlin' Wolf) recruit their cousin Sammy "Preacher Boy" Moore to play guitar at their juke joint. From the first strains of "Traveling" played on a resonator guitar, the film establishes blues as its sonic foundation. What Sinners reminds us is that blues wasn't always museum music. It was popular entertainment: visceral, sweaty music for all-night dancing. When Stack first hears Preacher Boy performing, he immediately recognizes its commercial appeal: "We're gonna make some money."

Coogler, on the In Proximity podcast, described his own discovery of blues as transformative: "If you like over-the-counter corn syrup, listening to blues music is like going to a maple tree and just drinking straight from the tree. It's raw, it's unprocessed. It's the roots of so much of American popular music."

Rhythm Travel and Musical Spirits

The film's centerpiece is a performance of "I Lied To You" (written by composer Ludwig Göransson and Raphael Saadiq) that transforms into something supernatural. When Preacher Boy croons "somebody take me in your arms tonight," it functions as both a romantic plea and a summoning of musical ancestors. What follows is a breathtaking visualization of what writer Amiri Baraka called "rhythm travel." Baraka argues that musical styles from hip-hop to R&B to soul to blues to West African traditions exist on a single unbroken continuum rather than as separate genres.

As Preacher Boy plays, musical spirits materialize in the juke joint from across time. First come the sounds of West African kora and ngoni (predecessors to the banjo) played by griots, poet-musicians who carried cultural narratives through generations. Then we leap to the psychedelic 1960s with an electric guitar virtuoso evoking Hendrix's otherworldly "Voodoo Child." The journey continues into hip-hop with booming 808 drums and turntable scratching, before moving into 1990s G-Funk with its distinctively whiny Moog synthesizers.

As the juke joint's walls literally fall away, people from all these different eras dance together surrounded by flames. It’s a powerful Afrofuturist vision that collapses time and space to show blues as both the inheritor of deeper traditions and the foundation of contemporary sounds.

Genre as Segregation

The film's antagonist, an ancient Irish vampire named Remmick, arrives with his followers to perform a song called "Pick Poor Robin Clean." Initially, their pale, hokey rendition seems to set up a straightforward metaphor for vampiric cultural appropriation: white artists draining Black music of its vitality for profit.

But Coogler has something far more sophisticated in mind. The actual history of "Pick Poor Robin Clean" refuses such easy categorization. It was first recorded in 1931 by Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas. Its meaning has been variously interpreted as expressing laughter through suffering or as sexual metaphor, its origins lost to time. On the WTF podcast, Coogler explained his revelation that "everything we think about as genre is fiction." In his view, genre functions as a form of segregation. The historical reality is that blues, country, and folk music coexisted and cross-pollinated in the American South before the music industry created rigid divisions for marketing purposes.

This insight explains why Remmick, born in 12th century Ireland during the English invasion, isn't a simple villain. Emerging from an era before the Atlantic slave trade and modern racial categories, he offers a complex "gift": everlasting life in a place beyond discrimination where musical traditions can recognize their common ground.

The film makes this musical argument explicit when Remmick leads his newly-converted Black vampires in "The Rocky Road to Dublin," a traditional Irish slip jig (who could possibly have foreseen a Vampire/Riverdance mashup?!). With fiddles that pulse and growl like blues guitars and rhythmic foot-stomping reminiscent of the juke joint, the scene suggests these musical cultures aren't natural enemies but potential allies separated by forces that benefit from their division.

Living Blues

Sinners concludes in the present with legendary bluesman Buddy Guy performing "Traveling," the same song that opened the film. At 88 years old, Guy's life mirrors the film's narrative: growing up in sharecropping communities before heading north to make his name in Chicago's electric blues scene. His performance reminds us that mythic figures like Robert Johnson were real people with living heirs today. The blues isn't a museum piece; it breathes and evolves in the present.

What makes Sinners remarkable is how it embeds these complex musical arguments within genuinely thrilling horror entertainment. It never feels like a history lesson, yet it challenges our understanding of American musical traditions more effectively than a documentary could. By revealing the continuities across musical traditions, Sinners offers a vision of American music liberated from artificial boundaries, where a blues guitar and an Irish fiddle might find unexpected harmony in the darkness.