“Just for a Few Hours, We Was Free”: The Blues and Mapping Freedom in Sinners (2025)
In the 2025 blockbuster Sinners, Ryan Coogler has a vampire story to tell. But before he can begin, he needs to tell another story—a blues one. Sinners opens with a voiceover thesis statement performed by Wunmi Mosaku (who plays Annie in the film—more on her below) about the work the blues can do, then rambles the narrative through and around 1932 Clarksdale, eventually settling into a juke joint outside of town. Here, the blues story builds to a frenzied climax, ultimately conjuring the vampires propelling the film’s second half. It’s those vampires that most immediately register as cinematic spectacle, but Coogler’s impetus to film in IMAX and leverage all of his professional relationships for the movie wasn’t the monsters—it was to showcase the blues at a scale the music deserves. In Sinners, the blues takes center stage as a generative sonic practice, sound that creates space to be and to know in the crevices of the material world, providing passage between oppression and freedom, life and death, past and future, and good and evil.
I’m not exaggerating in calling the opening voiceover a thesis. In a movie where Coogler trusts his audience with a great deal of interpretation, he puts an incredibly fine point on the role that blues performs here. We’re told that some musicians—be they Irish, West African, Native American, or southern US Black—are so skilled that they can pierce the veil separating the living from the dead, and while this piercing can help heal a community, it can also attract a certain evil that wants to exploit this rupture. The narrator doesn’t say “It’s the blues!” but the next visual information we get is that it’s Clarksdale, MS, in 1932, and an injured, blood-soaked Sammie (Miles Caton) is stumbling into his father’s church, clutching what’s left of the neck of a guitar. No one in Sinners says the word “crossroads,” but here we are, at the place where the blues meets the devil—where the end meets the beginning–and our young hero has a choice about which way he’s going to go.
If Coogler doesn’t fully trust his audience to know what to do with the blues without being told, it’s likely due to decades of commercialized attempts to defang the genre that have filtered out 21st century listeners’ ability to hear most of what makes the blues potent. Drawing on what Clyde Woods in Development Arrested (1998) has termed the “blues epistemology,” a blues way of knowing, B Brian Foster speaks with contemporary Black Clarksdalians in I Don’t Like the Blues (2020) to chart much of the current state of the blues. Pulling on one particular thread of Foster’s ethnography can help clarify what’s happening in Sinners, as he unpacks the many reasons why the blues don’t resonate quite like they used to.
In Woods’s framework, the blues is more than a musical genre; it’s a way of understanding and, crucially, reshaping one’s world. The blues, a genre arising in the late 19th century and reverberating through the 20th, functioned as epistemology in order to explore a way out from under plantation power after Reconstruction and through Jim Crow. Woods chronicles centuries of “plantation power” in the Delta and how that power reconfigures itself over and again through different eras of US history, always with the goal of extracting labor and life from Black Mississippians. The blues pushed against the edge of what was considered possible and sought to imagine and create a world that was free—not just from plantation power but from all the logics that support it or would circumscribe Black self-determination and autonomy. In I Don’t Like the Blues, Foster encapsulates the heart of blues epistemology with a flourish: “While many people hear the blues as performance and play, Black residents of Clarksdale knew it to be flesh and bone, a spirit in the dirt. Their blues was a conduit. A map. A method” (15-16). Throughout his book, Foster demonstrates that what the blues was is no longer what the blues is. One of those reasons is that resistance to plantation power (whether in the Delta or beyond) simply sounds different now, having worked its way through jazz and funk and soul and hip hop and trap.
In Sinners, Coogler starts by telling us what the blues could do, then he shows us that power in a climactic scene midway through the film, reminding his audience that a blues epistemology might not always sound the same, but it can still do the work of mapping out freedom. After the camera cuts away from Sammie at the crossroads in his church, we loop a bit back in time to meet Sammie’s cousins, the SmokeStack brothers (twins played by Michael B Jordan), who purchase the juke joint’s eventual location. The first half of the movie follows the brothers as they split up and get the band—and hospitality crew—together to open the venue that night. Sammie is new to this life, but a deeply gifted bluesman, and he receives counsel along the way about what the music is and how it works. Once the juke is packed, the booze is flowing, and the dancefloor is sweating, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) invites Sammie to take the stage and tell the people who he is and where he’s from. What follows is an ambitious narrative and technical feat that pays off the opening voiceover.
Sammie, also known as Preacher Boy, launches into a song called “I Lied to You,” addressed to his minister father (played by Saul Williams). It’s a confession that he’ll take the blues over the church any day. His singing pierces the veil, and we witness a litany of musicians joining the space from the past, present, and future: an Afrofuturist rock guitarist, hip hop DJs, breakers, twerkers, a ballerina, a Zaouli dancer, and Beijing opera performers, among others. Weaving in and out of Sammie’s blues, the sounds of each of these musicians layer and feed back into the mix to create a densely ecstatic sequence. This is the community healing piece of the voiceover thesis. The performers joining from far-flung places and times connect to an ancestral lineage of creative self-determination that runs through the patrons of the juke joint (Bo and Grace—played by Yao and Li Jun Li, respectively—are Chinese shop owners helping out at the juke joint and the presumed source of the Beijing opera performers).
Sinners’s musical conjuring isn’t an academic article, but it does have some musicological points to make. Audiences encounter musical styles uprooted from specific times and places, all mingling around this blues moment in 1932 Clarksdale. Coogler structures the scene by stacking out-of-time sound and movement, emphasizing the potency of a blues epistemology while also acknowledging that the blues’s power is situational. In its time—post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow—the blues could call in and draw on the fullness of diasporic music-making and world-mapping. But at other times, and in other places—say, a 2025 music venue—the blues is less likely to ignite such a moment as it is to show up as a participant, arriving as one of many in the musical ancestry to support the veil-piercers of the day. This phenomenon is the “changing same” of Black music, as Amiri Baraka put it in Blues People: “consistent attitudes with changed contexts” that explain why the sound changes over time (153). In Sinners, the immediate context is a community of Mississippi sharecroppers who seek healing, and the blues widens the frame so that the juke joint revelers can connect to and draw strength from a broader, deeper community beyond the edges of their material world.
As “I Lied to You” mingles with sounds past and future, the camera moves through the juke in a counterclockwise motion, grounding the scene further in diasporic ancestral practices. In Slave Culture (1987), Sterling Stuckey traces elements of Bakongo burial ceremonies throughout the New World, focusing especially on the ring shout, a sacred ceremony practiced by enslaved people in the United States involving a shuffling circular dance accompanied by song. Consistent across these traditions is counterclockwise movement:
Wherever in Africa the counterclockwise dance ceremony was performed—it is called the ring shout in North America—the dancing and singing were directed to the ancestors and gods, the tempo of the circle quickening during the course of movement. The ring in which the Africans danced and sang is the key to understanding the means by which they achieved oneness in America (12).
The counterclockwise circulation rehearses the life cycle, with the sun rising in the east (birth) and setting in the west (death), only to rise again (gesturing toward the connected nature of all life).
Stuckey draws on Robert Farris Thompson to note that special emphasis on counterclockwise motion would happen in Bakongo rituals that superimposed a cross on the circular movement, where the horizontal line represented the division between the living (above) and the dead (below). Here is the dividing line of Sinners, then: an ancestral ceremony with a crossroads superimposed on it, a blues invocation where the audience is propelled counterclockwise through the circle of juke joint dancers, where the dead and not yet alive join in the festivities.
The theme of lineage and ancestry courses through Coogler’s work. On the personal level, this may play out as a boxer sparring with his late father’s legacy. On a larger scale, Coogler often traverses the land of the Great Migration and the sea of the Middle Passage, tying back together the threads left dangling by the terrorisms of the transatlantic slave trade and Jim Crow. For a people whose lineage was savagely untethered by their ancestors’ enslavers, the power of a blues epistemology comes from its ability to tap into traditions and rituals that couldn’t be fully severed, restoring the “oneness” of those engaged in the dance and fueling their ability to imagine and create a path to freedom.
There is the other part of the voiceover’s thesis statement, though. When you pierce the veil, evil seeks to charge through. As the “I Lied to You” sequence hits peak intensity, Coogler treats movie audiences to another visual effect that the blues performers cannot see but feel; the juke joint appears to spontaneously combust and its roof is on fire (the roof, the roof. . .). Coogler metaphorically lets the motherfucker burn, down to the concrete foundation supporting the people as they continue to dance. At the edge of the dusty parking lot, the movie’s villain—an Irish vampire named Remmick—watches lustily while flanked by his latest converts. He wants Sammie; particularly what Sammie knows how to do.
Because Remmick hive-minds with whomever he turns into a vampire, taking on their memories and abilities, if he can get at Sammie, he’ll be able to pierce the veil, too, and commune once again with his long lost ancestors. We could read Remmick’s drive as an allegory about cultural appropriation, a white man who wants to steal the blues, and certainly there’s an element of that at play. But the “Killmonger was right” corollary of Coogler films suggests that villains are often more complex than they may at first seem. In Sinners, there’s a mob of Klansmen that function as the more straightforward baddies, but Coogler isn’t interested in giving them much screen time. Yet he lingers with Remmick just as he did with Killmonger and Namor in his two Black Panther installments. In each of these cases, Coogler explores different experiences of what it’s like when the boot of Empire is on your neck. Remmick, coming from Britain’s first colony, speaks of his home being taken and of religion being forced on him. He seems to hold genuine disdain for the Klan and notes that he’s happy to turn them all to prey, not because he wants what they have but because they deserve a gruesome death. He plays and dances to the music of his ancestors with care and devotion. And he argues that what he has to offer—community with his coven, the power to overtake the plantation class, eternal life—is better than what Smoke, Stack, Sammie, and the rest of the juke joint patrons currently have.
No one living trusts Remmick—in fact, Annie (Mosaku), the heart, brain, and wisdom of the movie, specifically distrusts him even before he reveals his true vampiric nature. And Coogler doesn’t position Remmick to be perceived as “good” in any sense of the word, except at playing that banjo. But, like Killmonger and Namor, Remmick gets to be right about some things. It appears in flickers of concession on characters’ faces when Remmick tells them they live in a place where they’ll always have to fight to even try to be truly free. It appears again when the juke joint protectors melt a bit during Remmick & Co’s performance of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” a glimmer of a thought of “wait, should we let them come inside and play this absolute bop??” (for detailed historical context for this song see Daphne Brooks’s “See My Face on the Other Side” [2017]). Coogler’s villains ultimately suffer defeat, but before they do, he makes sure audiences glimpse how they’ve suffered under Empire, offering an understanding of their destructive actions as born of unhealed generational trauma.
Piercing the veil is tricky work. Dangerous work. In The Long Emancipation (2021), Rinaldo Walcott notes that “much of what we have come to call Black culture is a mode of living life within, against, and beyond plantation logics” (20), not only a rejection of logics of oppression but also a practice of creating and nurturing something else. To set about finding knowledge and being, as Sylvia Wynter puts it, “completely outside our present conception of what it is to be human” is to set off into the not-fully-known, where one may encounter a variety of ideas and beings who won’t ultimately lead you to freedom but who may offer you something a little better than what you’ve got (Wynter, 2000 interview with David Scott, 136). Walcott calls this the difference between emancipation and actual freedom. While emancipation is often mistaken for freedom, Walcott argues that “postemancipation acts of Black life have been consistently interdicted, thereby preempting and often violently preventing Black life from authorizing its own desires for bodily autonomy” (105), preventing Black life from being free.
In Sinners, Coogler shows us the way the blues could clear space for finding freedom, but none of the characters in the movie make it all the way there. It’s a movie situated in the long emancipation, where an imposed religion calls the blues the devil’s music, where plantation sharecropping and the Klan violently forestall Black freedom (but sometimes get what’s coming to them), and where various vampires carrying their own intergenerational trauma try to seduce Black people into accepting a different flavor of emancipation in place of the freedom the blues leads them toward. The map to freedom may not sound like the blues anymore, but Sinners reminds us the work isn’t done.
—
Featured images: Screen Capture by SO!: Sammie’s right hand clutching broken guitar neck, black cross in the background against white wall [2:10]
—
Justin Burton is a Professor of Music at Rider University, teaching primarily in the Music Production degree as well as in the Gender & Sexuality Studies program, and author of Posthuman Rap (Oxford, 2017) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music (Oxford, 2018).
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
They Can Hear Us: Surveillance and Race in “A Quiet Place”–Justin Burton
Can’t Nobody Tell Me Nothin: Respectability and The Produced Voice in Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”–Justin Burton
SO! Amplifies: The Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club–Chelsea Adams
“Music More Ancient than Words”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories on Africana Aurality — Aaron Carter-Ényì
Music Meant to Make You Move: Considering the Aural Kinesthetic–Imani Kai Johnson
Share this:
Alan Lomax’s Southern Journey and the Sound of Authenticity
Welcome back to 100 Years of Alan Lomax, Sounding Out!‘s series dedicated to remembering, rethinking and challenging our understanding of this crucial figure in folk music history.
In contrast to the first post in the series by Mark Davidson, which looked at how we have branded Alan Lomax, Parker Fishel‘s post considers how Alan Lomax fashioned himself—as both a collector and a publisher of other peoples’ music. The complexity of this task is inherent in the social and political ramifications of “saving” sound by making it “ours,” both in terms of singular ownership of singular recordings that had previously “belonged” to a community as well as the extent to which this practice brought these sounds to the wider culture.
Here, Fishel invites the reader to consider this complicated history that surrounds collecting and copyrighting folk music, what (and whom) the practice has excluded as well current performers who have been inspired by this preservation of our sound culture to perpetuate the practice: making it “theirs” and “ours” once again.
— Guest Editor Tanya Clement
—
The more one listens, views, and reads the work of pioneering folklorist Alan Lomax, the more inscrutable it becomes. Even if we set aside the sheer size and diversity of his collection, we are still left with a set of materials that eludes easy interpretation. Too mainstream for the academics and too academic for the mainstream, Lomax’s defiant, passionate quest to bridge the two worlds pioneered the study of sound as an embodiment of social and community dynamics. Yet in promoting American vernacular culture, Lomax also fashioned himself a folk hero, leaving us a legacy where the collector threatens to overshadow the collection. As arguably the world’s most famous folklorist, Lomax is responsible for much of the sound understood as authentic Americana.
Consider one vignette of many: the “Southern Journey,” a 1959-1960 recording trip that Alan Lomax undertook with Shirley Collins throughout Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. A world unto itself, the story of the Southern Journey reveals how these tensions shaped Lomax’s work and, to an extent, our understanding of a national cultural heritage.
“Radio Recording, Late 20th Century” by Flickr user Mike Licht, CC BY 2.0
To begin with, the Southern Journey sounded different than previous collecting trips due to the technological sophistication of the field recording set-up. Starting with a 1933 trip accompanying his father John A. Lomax, Alan Lomax’s previous recording expeditions in the South had relied first on Edison cylinders and then on disc-based recorders that had particular weaknesses in terms of fidelity. Surface noise obfuscated certain frequencies and reminded the listener that his or her experience was mediated. During the Southern Journey though, open reel magnetic tape, excellent microphones, and a mixer were employed to make what Lomax, in his tendency towards self-aggrandizement, claimed to be the “first” stereo field recordings in the South. Whatever the reality, the recordings were early efforts to use stereo in the service of field recording to capture more detail and nuance of a performance and its context.
Writing of the opportunity stereo presented for folklore, Lomax noted that “Folk music which, in its natural setting, is meant to be heard in the round, comes into its own with multi-dimensionality, for more than concert music, designed to project from the stage into an auditorium.” According to this reasoning, a good recording in stereo is more inclusive, grounding the listener’s position inside the soundscape of folklore’s community-based practice.
Yet, by nature folklore recordings have certain limitations. As jazz record producer Orrin Keepnews noted, “Our job is to create what is best described as ‘realism’ — the impression and effect of being real — which may be very different from plain unadorned reality.” This murky dividing line is problematic in the context of ethnographic documentation. In the case of Alan Lomax, it’s further complicated by multiple motivations and goals that transform this line into a shifting set of markers.
“30th January 2014” by Flickr user themostinept, CC BY-SA 2.0
Luckily, through diligent scholarship and Lomax’s own documentation, we are fairly aware of how this “realism” tension shaped his recordings in real-time performance and its public reception. Lomax sometimes auditioned performers when arriving in a new area; his book The Land Where The Blues Began (in part an reconstruction of the Southern Journey) was written 30-plus years after the fact from memory and a few scribbled notes on the back of tape boxes. However this knowledge impacts the supposed reality of the field recordings, it would be a mistake to reduce the extensive documentation of Lomax’s decision-making process to debunking. Rather, it is an aid for understanding what we’re hearing. By accounting for ethnographic and popularizing tendencies, what is really being developed is a guide for critical listening.
Part of that involved bringing in the recording industry. Starting with the 1939 Musicraft release of Leadbelly performances on 78-RPM discs, Lomax consistently used record companies as one means of bringing folklore to a wider audience. Commenting on the flurry of activity that accompanied Lomax’s 1959 return to the United States after nearly a decade abroad, noted folklorist Roger Abrahams commented, “To this writer it would appear that Mr. Lomax stayed up nights thinking of ways to sell folk-things to publishers, record companies, etc., ergo to the public.”
The Southern Journey was one such project, bankrolled by Atlantic Records. From nearly 80 hours of recorded material, Lomax curated two sets of releases in 1960, a seven LP Atlantic Records collection named the “Southern Folk Heritage Series” and the 12-LP “Southern Journey” series for Prestige International. In notes for reissues of the Atlantic set, Lomax admitted, “The set reflects, to some extent, what the Erteguns [Ahmet and Nesuhi, founders of Atlantic] felt might best reach their pop audience.” Examining how these recordings became canonical is to look at how new modes of cultural transmission affected folklore traditions.
Sales Fact Sheet for Atlantic’s “Southern Folk Heritage Series”
We can hear another tension being negotiated in the way Lomax celebrated performances, which today justly rank alongside those of the Great American Songbook. Yet, to see them that way negates the core strengths of folklore: flexibility to situation and contingency to community. In the field, Lomax asserted that “every performance is original, a fresh and intentionally varied re-creation or rearrangement of a piece.” At the same moment, however, Americanizing processes were transforming these flexible local improvisatory practices into fixed inscriptions of national character. With his public visibility and prestige, the pieces in Lomax’s books and records carried weight as definitive versions – claims Lomax perpetuated in order to unify some of his cultural theories. (It also didn’t hurt that the practice of early folklorists was to copyright these compositions, giving them a financial stake in perpetuating those performances as examples of exceptionalism.) As a result, the public adopted a set of arbitrary songs and sounds as markers of authenticity.
These concerns remain important in the music’s continuing, living traditions. Groups like the Carolina Chocolate Drops or The Ebony Hillbillies perform the full, eclectic spectrum of early African-American string and jug bands traditions. While Jerron ‘Blind Boy’ Paxton forges similar terrain using the African-American songster and blues singer as a model, Frank Fairfield addresses Anglo-American folk traditions. All of these projects remind listeners of the arbitrary divisions of authenticity forced on musicians practices by the race recording industry, which partitioned sounds as white and black and led to our modern taxonomy of genres. These performers use folklore to expose parts of the under-documented past, re-appropriating musical styles and often re-creating that world through the adoption of early 20th century language, clothes, and mannerisms.
Other contemporary performers handle these issues differently. Megafaun, Fight The Big Bull, and Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver) form the nucleus of Sounds of the South, a “loving reinterpretation of the sound, structure, lyrics, and spirit” of the Southern Journey recordings. Engaging both the African-American and Anglo-American traditions documented on that trip, the group finds its sound in their overlap. This a space shaped in part by the popularizing processes Lomax set in motion, a space where generations of listeners have been introduced to Mississippi Fred McDowell through a Rolling Stones cover. Approaching the music from this perspective and not from the background of a Forest City Joe or an Almeda Riddle, authenticity necessarily exists in a different realm: re-interpretation. The resulting arrangements, such as that of Estil C. Ball’s sacred composition “Tribulations,” give one illustration of how these dynamics play out sonically within the world of folklore and music that Lomax left behind.
For this particular piece, the words and melody of Ball’s “terrifying meditation on the end of days” are kept as links to the original recording. This frees the ensemble to follow its muse into the musical landscapes of the intervening 50-plus years, shaped as they were by the introduction of the vernacular into the mainstream (and vice versa). Ball’s melody evokes an archetype, the high lonesome sound of Appalachia; a trope it inspired in the first place. Yet, in this cultural confluence, there is also space for something like Matthew E. White’s soul-influenced electric guitar. In introducing of a style, tradition, and sound beyond the original recording, a color line is crossed that, while maybe not explicitly heard, was certainly present in the Jim Crow context of the Southern Journey. For Sounds of the South, authenticity exists beyond mere re-creation.
What might Lomax’s reaction to the Sounds of the South project be? Reflecting on the 1960s folk scene, Lomax wrote, “The American city folk singer, because he got his songs from books or other city singers, has generally not been aware of the singing style or the emotional content of the folk songs, as they exist in tradition.” On the other hand, Lomax might be heartened that many, whether cultural heritage institutions or record labels, are following in the footsteps of his own Association for Cultural Equity. Working on the scale that digital resources facilitate, these organizations are providing access to field recordings and their context in ways never before possible. (What remains to be seen is how this might impact the process of codification discussed above.)
In another way, the Sounds of the South marks a return to tradition. While the Southern Journey recordings are the primary inspiration, Sounds of the South member Joe Westerlund describes the project as something larger: “We wanted to include everything that we’re into, not just the traditional folk music that’s on this box set…We’re doing our whole experience as musicians.” That experience involves collaboration with folk artists like the Blind Boys of Alabama and Alice Gerrard, as well as investment in their local cultural communities of Durham, NC, Richmond, VA, and Eau Claire, WI.
Alan Lomax (left) with Richard Queen of Soco Junior Square Dance Team at the Mountain Music Festival, Asheville, North Carolina; via the Library of Congress Lomax Collection
Lomax’s pedagogy of folklore situates authenticity as a function of these very types of activities. “Folk song lives in a rather mysterious world close to the heart of the human community and it is only through extended and serious contact with living folk traditions that it can be understood.” The particular tradition in which one participates makes little difference; rather emphasis is on the process of engagement and contact, which replicate older patterns of folklore transmission. So even if Lomax may have claimed there was a bit too much bel canto to suit his tastes, one can imagine his appreciation for Sounds of the South’s dedication to the meaning and spirit of the music.
Considering Alan Lomax, his work, and his legacy is a complex and often frustrating enterprise. Yet amidst parts that give us pause, there remain bits of enduring wisdom. Addressing a gathering of folklorists, Lomax asserted that “Underneath we are all morally, emotionally and esthetically involved with our material, and so all of us are artists and cultural workers, and there is no escape from that.”
Few of us devote ourselves to this kind of music (or any kind of music for that matter) as a detached academic exercise. It can take an example of the living tradition like Sounds of the South looking backwards and forwards to remind us of the full scope of our responsibilities. I can’t think of any more fitting tribute on the occasion of his centenary than to re-commit ourselves not to Alan Lomax, but to what caught his ear in the first place: the transcendent experience of sound.
—
Parker Fishel is an archivist, writer, and researcher living in Brooklyn, New York. Presently he is the archivist at Grey Water Park Productions and an occasional DJ on WKCR-FM. As co-founder of Americana Music Productions, Parker is the producer of a forthcoming set of music, photographs, and scholarship documenting the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. He is also at work on Georgia Griot, a bio-discography of jazz musician Marion Brown. While getting an MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, Parker worked with the UT Folklore Center Archives and the John Avery Lomax Family Papers at the Briscoe Center for American History.
—
Featured image: “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender” by Flickr user Bee Collins, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Ain’t Got the Same Soul” — Osvaldo Oyola
On the Lower Frequencies: Norman Corwin, Colorblindness, and the “Golden Age” of U.S. Radio — Jennifer Stoever
Six Years in Nodar: Sound Art in a Rural Context — Rui Costa
Share this:
Current Top Posts
April 2021
January 2020
November 2019
October 2019
August 2019
April 2014
November 2017
March 2015
December 2017
October 2015
Sounding Out! 
Recent Comments