"Sinners" and the Bad History of the Blues

Essentializing the Delta-Chicago connection used to be a white-boy game.

Up front, and just so you know where I’m coming from, I think “Sinners” is a very bad movie on every level, and having said that, I know some readers will want to drop off right here. Fair. I’m writing about something related, which even if you loved “Sinners,” might be of interest, or not. Just avoiding surprises!

The movie’s mood is conjured by its opening pronouncement, in voiceover:

There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future. In ancient Ireland, they were called Filí. In Choctaw land, they called them Firekeepers. And in West Africa, they're called Griots. . . .

That’s true. There are indeed a zillion such stories, stretching back into the prehistory of human life on every inhabited continent. I don’t know if the next part, which is what the movie’s about, is true:

. . . This gift can bring healing to their communities. But it also attracts evil.

… but it doesn’t matter. The idea of death’s being separated from life by a veil, which some musicians can pierce, serves the movie as a premise for a fiction based on an allegory in which black music attracts a white form of evil in the Mississippi Delta, around Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the 1930’s. The blues styles of that region, associated by the movie with the deepest, most essentially authentic experience of black Americans’ preservation of ancient African traditions and wisdom, are sniffed out by an ancient vampire who wants to drink up that music, take its blackness, the deep authenticity of it, wants to own and meld and homogenize it with his own music, which appears to be Irish, as suggested by the stomping slip-jig “Rocky Road to Dublin,” sung and danced with great intensity by his vampire crew.

As I’ve understood the situation, vampires normally need fresh blood—both literal blood, drained out of humans by biting them on the neck, and new vampires, recruited by also biting humans on the neck. This vampire and his recruits, by contrast, need to batten on the Delta blues. They think they can get it by biting and thereby recruiting the whole Clarksdale black music scene, as an avenue for getting to the most gifted of the local musicians.

The head vampire at one point suggests that his non-normal desire originates in having experienced the suppression and loss of an ancient, pre-Christian, pagan people’s culture—so can we gather the beef goes all the way back to the Romans? And yet one example of his music is the beautiful “Wild Mountain Thyme,” which a lot of people think of as a traditional Irish song, though it’s based on a composition in a Scottish, not an Irish vein, written by professional English composers and published as sheet music in London the late 18th Century. The Irish musician Francis McPeake recorded the version he titled “Wild Mountain Thyme” in the 1950s, which is after the action of the movie, so maybe the head vampire too can conjure spirits from the past and the future. [UPDATE: I’m reminded by Dermot O Connor, in the comments, that “Rocky Road to Dublin” too of course was written by a pro, in the 1840’s (you can tell, just from the lyrics, that it doesn’t emerge from some ancient pre-Christian collective volkness).]

Maybe Anglo cultural cannibalization—a minstrelsy of its own, where nothing’s authentic—is what’s been bugging the head vampire all these centuries. On the other hand, he and his band go out of their way to demonstrate to the Delta crowd that they’ve already made solid headway in taking in and homogenizing other styles in black music, like that of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” and he claims that all he wants to do with Delta blues is make everybody eternally happy, in a fellowship of what sounds to us, though not to him, like a zombieland where individuality and intensity disappear in a vapid cultural process that we might call racial integration.

Even the two white people whom we see him recruit lose their cultural individuality once he’s chewed their necks. When he met them, they were avowed racists. Now they’re … hell, I don’t know, I find this allegory confusing, as you can see; for all I know, I have it completely backward.

Building a cogent allegorical social satire, about good and evil in America, on the eternally tangled history of African, Anglo, and Celtic vernacular music in America (with some quick references to the Asian and the Native American), and dovetailing it with a realistic story, though a thin one, about some guys opening a juke joint, plus a horror movie about vampires, which is where the depth is supposed to come from, was always going to cause certain problems with clarity.

Ambiguity? That can be good. Nuance too. Allegories are rarely good, because they require nothing but clarity of the most rigid kind; everything has to symbolize something else, and nothing else but that. An ambiguous allegory? Forget it. A horror movie with no sense of humor (and no horror plot developing even at the forty-minute mark)? Forget that too.

What interests me is the connection of white vampirism to Delta blues. Because there’s truth to that.

Ironic truth. The notion of Delta styles as a distinctly, exceptionally authentic kind of blues, with especially deep ties to ancient griot and other African traditions, contrary in some ways, but not in all ways, to Christianity, was developed by white record collectors and writers and promoters, beginning not, as is often said, in the mid-1960’s blues revival but in the early 1940’s. The term “Delta blues” itself is a product of that construction. It’s a big, fascinating story, which I’m not going to tell here. The great book on it is In Search of the Blues, by Marybeth Hamilton. Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta also makes some good points. Contra the Wald viewpoint is Ted Goia, whose views on these issues I mainly disagree with, but who adds to the discussion a lot of texture that needs to be taken account of.

Those white guys of the ‘40’s who suddenly latched onto 20’s and ‘30’ records of rural blues, as opposed to the glitzier, big-band early blues records of Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, and others, fell especially hard for blues styles prevalent in the Mississippi Delta, probably first heard on recordings by Charley Patton, but also by Son House and of course Robert Johnson, styles that would develop, in the 1950’s, into electrified Chicago blues. And those collectors of then-obscure records were quite weird. Like the head vampire in the movie, they hungered for roots driving deep into Mississippi mud, for ancient Yoruba spells, for authenticity stolen by modernity (to the vampire, that’s Christianity; to the 1940’s blues nerds it was industrialization). Unlike the vampire, however, they were projecting the thing they were looking for onto the music they were hearing. You could say they were trying to hear some elemental magic. You might even call that magic a piercing of the veil between life and death, a conjuring of spirits from the past and the future.

They never saw any Mississippi mud, any cotton fields; they heard what they were seeking, as so many of us have, on recordings, in their case 78-rpm shellac. As Marybeth Hamilton puts it, when describing the revelatory discovery of a Charley Patton record by a thirty-something collector in Brooklyn named James McKune: “It was there at the Williamsburg YMCA, in a single room sometime in the mid-1940’s, that the Delta blues was born.”

You think you know music nerds? Until you’ve read about these guys, you really don’t. As a group that hung around Indian Joe’s record shop on West 47th Street in Manhattan, they became obsessive enthusiasts, as Hamilton puts it, and they do impress me. From their reverent attitude and weird fantasies came such things as the widely retailed vision of the career of Robert Johnson, whom we know from 41 brilliant tracks he recorded in 1936 and ‘37. You can get anything you want out of any music. For what it’s worth, I don’t hear in Johnson’s blues the piercing of a veil between life and death or a magical power regarding past and future; I don’t hear a griot. (When the musicologist Sam Charters went to West Africa in search of “the roots of the blues,” as his book is titled, he came up empty.) I hear delicacy balancing drive, a riveting interplay between playing and singing, and the rough textures of a certain man’s daily life in this world. Which, sure, sometimes involves walking with the Devil, or seeing the blues walking like a man, or outrunning a hellhound.

That’s me: What’s actually important is that all we have of Johnson are those blues recordings. In real life, the guy played country music, kids’ songs, goofy radio pop hits, religious songs, and everything else there was to play. Blues was just one modality, not exceptionally deep or ancient or “African”—a modality that record companies, which were run, of course, by white men, were then trying hard to sell to black audiences, not with a lot of success. Blues is just one modality, and Johnson was a real person. Those facts don’t fit the image that many people—mainly it’s been white people—have ever wanted to have of Johnson or the blues.

One of the cool and useful thing about blues is that almost anyone can play it. A very cool thing about Johnson is that he was unusually good. That affects how the movie handles the music itself—the thing we’re invited to care about. Our main character is supposed to be a new Johnson or Charley Patton or Son House. Onscreen, he’s manifestly not that, not even close, so whenever he plays, other characters have to come off totally mindblown by what they’re hearing, which puts a strain on the acting and writing (and that’s in the realistic part of the movie). This was an issue in “A Complete Unknown” too. Even the real young Dylan, let alone Timmy, though he’s a brilliant actor, wasn’t knocking everybody out every time he opened his mouth and struck a chord. (The young Robert Johnson wasn’t good at first either; he had to go off by himself and sell his soul to the Devil practice practice practice.) Watching the early part of the movie, I wondered why certain famous songs heard in the background, like “Wang Dang Doodle,” are covers, since the originals are so immediate and compelling and can’t be hard to get the rights to. Maybe it’s because the originals would point up how poorly the music that the actors perform in the scenes compares to the models.

Those white NYC record nerds of the 1940’s really were vampire-like. They sucked the humanity out of an entire musical culture, remade it in the image of their own dreams of intensity and blackness and southernness, and bit a lot of our necks in the process. So did the lefty field-recording guys who worked for the Library of Congress (if the vampire were Alan Lomax with a big reel-to-reel, I’d think the joke was funny). I find that trying to let go of the raft of preconceptions those guys laid so decisively on the music, which did develop into the essentializing of Chicago blues by white players and fans, makes it easier for me to hear the true intensity of a Son House, or for that matter of a Buddy Guy, but the way the movie works, the vampire isn’t projecting. In the movie, that deep-folk authenticity, that pre-modern, pre-Roman, pre-Christian Africanness, which the vampire yearns to slurp up and then, though he may or may not know it, mingle with everything else he’s slurped up and then just boringly fart out, is supposed to be, within the rules of the movie, such as they are, real.

We know the authenticity is supposed to be real, because it’s right there, in 1930’s Clarksdale, as painstakingly depicted by the movie. The irony is that the 1930’s Clarksdale depicted by the movie is the unreal product of a fantasy projected by white people on African America, a fantasy of a time and place when griots still walked the modern earth, a fantasy that got so worked into our pop culture that it may be impossible to pierce the veil and see what might have really been there. Thanks to a notably corrupt and racist music business, though—and thanks to those vampire record collectors—we do at least have some of the music.