The supernatural thriller Sinners, starring Black Panther and Creed alum Michael B. Jordan has had an unanticipated ripple effect in the world of entertainment. Set in rural Mississippi circa 1932, the film's soundtrack has exposed an entire new generation to the heart-rending vocals and bare-bones instrumentation of Delta Blues.
In every possible way, the Delta Blues genre contradicts today's dominant trends. It is raw, acoustic, and unpolished, with minimal instrumentation. Performers are often accompanied only by a single guitar.
Structurally, it is similarly stripped-down. While the traditional 12 Bar Blues paradigm is built on a three-chord framework, Delta Blues artists sometimes further distill their tunes to only one or two chords. This minimalist approach gives songs like R.L. Burnside’s spooky “Goin’ Down South” a hypnotic, droning quality utterly unlike anything you'll hear on the radio.
The last time a niche genre got the Hollywood treatment like this was in 2000, when O Brother Where Art Thou catapulted Bluegrass into the mainstream. Overnight, and largely thanks to George Clooney’s vocal double (and longtime Allison Krauss collaborator) Dan Tyminsky, Bluegrass shed its reputation as hokey hillbilly music, revealing itself as technically complex and emotionally resonant.
Like Bluegrass, Delta Blues is a purely American artform, devoid of artifice, affectation, or electric amplification. What the banjo and fiddle are for Bluegrass, the acoustic guitar and harmonica are for Delta Blues. In contrast, while Bluegrass tends towards virtuosic, high-speed playing that reflects the tradition of European folk music, Delta Blues has a more languorous vibe. Leaning heavily on the tradition of plantation spirituals and work songs, the music is slow in tempo and weighty in tone, evoking weariness, sorrow, and pain.
In Sinners, music has a supernatural aspect, “piercing the veil” between space, time, and planes of existence. This fantastical concept can also be seen as a metaphor for the ethos of the Blues, which prescribes music not as a way to wallow in painful feelings, but to let them go. In the movie, songs are powerful enough to summon harmful psychic entities; in reality, they do the opposite: they allow both singer and listener to banish their harmful psychic companions.
The Sinners soundtrack is not 100% Delta Blues – it features vintage party tunes like “Wang Dang Doodle,” as well as modern-sounding productions like Hailee Steinfeld's “Dangerous,” the Bluegrass-flavored “Old Corn Liquor,” and even traditional Irish music (in the world of Sinners, vampirism doesn’t just confer agelessness, it also grants vocal and musical ability). Nonetheless, numbers like “I Lied to You” and “Pale, Pale Moon,” despite their studio trappings, channel the traditional Delta sound in ways that are captivating younger moviegoers.
The appeal of the Sinners soundtrack might be a surprise to music executives, but there is a logical explanation. Every trend fuels a counter-trend, so it makes sense that a mass-market culture dominated by computers, synthetic perfection, and digital deception would stimulate a thirst for raw, stripped-down artistry.
For decades, listeners have been subjected to music dwelling on violent, nihilistic, or depressive imagery – music that makes you feel worse instead of better. Blues is the antidote to that synthetic misery. It acknowledges sadness and hurt without glorifying it or accepting defeat; it discards everything unnecessary, and connects audiences of all eras and backgrounds to universal feelings of desire, rejection, passion, and heartache. It is, in a word, human. As the film’s cameo by 88-year-old Buddy Guy so clearly demonstrates, in a culture dominated by machines, this is music that speaks to our souls.
Audiences are flocking to theaters for Sinners, and for at least some moviegoers, what they're hearing is having even more of an impact than what they’re seeing. With any luck, the film’s soundtrack will be more than a passing fad, stimulating a renewed interest in Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, R.L. Burnside, and the many other phenomenal artists of the Delta genre. Their earthy observations and soulful laments may be from a simpler time, but perhaps that’s exactly what this overly-complicated era needs.