Albert Murray as Key and Corrective to Sinners (2025)

And so I come as an intruder in the dust. The air is thick with praise, justifiably so, for the many achievements of Ryan Coogler’s film, Sinners. Not only has it proven the power of original narratives at the box office, Sinners has given us a new model of filmmaker ownership that could revolutionize the relationship between director and studio. As a Creed fanatic and writer on blues and jazz culture, I, too, swooned at the premise of a blues blockbuster. Coogler’s world hums with vitality and revels in its sensual visual excellence. As the dust up settles in our much-needed collective clamor for this film, however, I feel the time has come for a second, closer look. Despite the loveliness of each thread Coogler spins in his image-loom, the director loses the beat such that these resplendent elements each go off spinning into the night for want of a partner, spurned and spurred.

This is not a takedown. Rather, I’d like to propose (as did, recently, NYT critic Wesley Morris) that Coogler’s film is best understood, and can have its unfinished flights of imagination completed, by a reading of the late-great American critic Albert Murray (close friend of Ralph Ellison and influential writer on American popular culture). Morris’ piece, however, invokes Murray without allowing his conjured presence take us all the way to the dance’s conclusion. In particular, Murray’s 1976 music criticism masterpiece, Stomping the Blues, makes the case for the syncretic spiritual power of the blues in a way that Coogler appears anxious to make: That there is a magic, a power, an incontrovertible life-giving energy to the blues not only as music but as a way of life. 

Let me walk you down this road, dear reader.

To start, I’ll need to sketch where Sinners fails to connect. The central moral question of Sinners goes as follows: how can the budding bluesman, Preacherboy, stand before his father, the Preacher Man, and provide justification for his “sinner” ways? We return to that image of a bloodied boy gripping his busted guitar after breaking up Sunday morning service and looking into Jedidiah’s eyes again and again throughout the film. We are primed for the violence by this shot and prepare to witness this instantiation of the eternal dialectic between Fathers and Sons by the end of the film. This image provides us the line to trace our steps along.

At the heart of this particular disagreement is the division between the black church and black popular music—a battle between ostensibly competing ethos’ that has gone on for decades and is a recurring theme in Murray’s writing. In recent years, you can be sure to find complaints from both sides of the aisle about, say, the overbearing, stultifying shame of respectability politics or the moral corruptions of the latest Megan Thee Stallion release. Nearly fifty years ago, Murray put on his best, most magnificent dancing attire to summon for us an answer that repels the trite, delights the intellect, and propels the magic of the music, to reveal for us “the dance hall as temple.” His basic argument begins in Stomping the Blues: “And hence in consequence the fundamental function of the blues musicians (also known as the jazz musician), the most obvious as well as the most pragmatic mission of whose performance is not only to drive the blues away and hold them at bay at least for the time being, but also to evoke an ambiance of Dionysian revelry in the process.” And while all that may seem contrary to the “church,” it’s important to see the moves as “ceremonially deliberate drag steps and shaking and grinding,” as “sacramental strutting and swinging,” because: “In point of fact, traditionally the highest praise given a blues musician has been the declaration that he can make a dance hall rock and roll like a downhome church during revival time.” Both the blues and black church music can be seen as a particular fusion of African and American Protestant religious sensibilities, always in conversation with the church as training ground for many a musician and many a late-night stomper being present for Sunday morning service. 

All right, all right, all right. If we take Murray’s writing as the prophetic text of spiritual-sensual commingling in blues, we can see Coogler’s core narrative question as precisely framed to dramatize this vision in a manner fit to film. Indulgently, Sinners vamps for nearly an hour before its primary conflict (that between the vampires and the Saturday night revelers) comes to a head. In that magnificent hour, Coogler stirs up innumerable images of the prewar South that truly sing. They are also tantalizing as we (the knowing audience) see the vague outline of possible remedies to the evil of the vampires and the looming threat of the Ku Klux Klan invoked by Hogwood, the deceptive sawmill salesman. The energy of this vamp comes from Coogler’s titanic effort to center both impeccable historical detail (wardrobe and set design juking as hard as they can) alongside respect for the Mississippi mythos. Let’s list a few of these images:

Choctaw vampire hunters on horseback. Wow!

Annie and her hoodoo—a master practitioner of the old ways with power enough to protect her husband and brother-in-law from afar, with unquestionable gravitas on screen. Wow!

Smoke and Stack—twin gangsters bursting with virility, parlaying their WW1 experience and a swindling of the Irish mob and Italian mafia into dividends for a local juke joint (black owned with black music and circulating hard, cold cash). Wow!

The Chow Family. Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta, as tough as the rest of ‘em and boasting a true Southern twang. Wow!

Mary, a beauty who has passed for white, stricken with that precise blend of hate, remorse, and longing all-too-common in the Delta as lovers came and went on the railways, portraying the blueness of the blue note with utmost cool. Wow!

Delta Slim as a rough-and-tough bluesman with memory of many a party and many an tragedy. Wow!

Pearline, the married blueswoman who steals the screen with her smoldering looks and stolen glances at Sammie. Wow!

And, last but not least, Sammie himself. A young boy trusted by his father with a guitar and accompanies the Smoke/Stack twins. He is a prodigy blues performer, tempted more ways than one by the world of the late night revelers but is himself the object of attention when he begins to play. Wow!

This vamp builds and builds and builds again till we reach a fever pitch at the Juke Joint. You can see how, Murray devotee that I am, my interpretive nose would sense in this the nascent elements of a pungent refusal of dichotomous thinking about the sacred and profane in relation to the blues. Sammie’s song is directed towards his father and filled with the anguish felt by many an exile, outcast, or otherwise maligned person who finds their stride (if only, if only, they could see me now). Coogler, wiser than many a casual Western practitioner of astrological or “pagan” methods, has respect enough for the blues as Bacchic communal rite to recognize that when the spirits are invoked, you have a decent chance of summoning a wicked one. And the wicked ones do indeed heed the call of Sammie’s world-rending performance, namely Remmick and his vampire mates.

And here we find the perfect moment for Coogler to bring the house crashing down with a demonstration of how the blues—diabolical as they may seem to the uninitiated—may enact a ritual of purification and affirmation towards (communal) redemption. The scene of Sammie’s chorus of musical genius past and present is nothing less than inspired (and continues the long-running relation between nightwalkers and the music video, from The Hunger to Blade). One wonders how Coogler will develop one of his melodic lines to counter the devilish outsiders. Perhaps Annie will reveal a hoodoo remedy the vampires are unprepared for? Have Delta Slim or Pearline heard of an antidote to blood suckers on their tours of the Chitlin’ Circuit? Maybe Smoke and Stack will think up a way to escape with their war-tested mettle? Could Grace remember a story of similar creatures in Chinese folklore to find a solution unknown to these Westerners? In the horizon, do the Choctaw vampire hunters reappear with reinforcements? Or could Sammie’s cosmic riffs allow a greater benevolent spirit to intervene or exile Remmick into limbo?

No, in fact. It’s been noted that the narrative has a particularly straight interpretation of the vampire myth. This includes requiring the intrepid, complex heroes to bludgeon their way out of the mess with garlic and wooden stakes. Alongside this, we (as the audience) watch as certain radiant narrative threads are cut short without much solemnity. When Mary is turned into a vampire, she’s gone. There will never be a reconciliation between her and Stack. When Stack is slain via seduction, his chance to perform heroics is stolen. Soon, the vast majority of the black and brown faces that filled the dancehall with riotous joy have been cut down (we cringe as Delta Slim tells the crowd to leave the safety of the sawmill). It’s a grim, grim moment registered confusedly.

Here, the stumbles continue. The characters dispute and prove (over several minutes) a fact very well known to the audience: the devils outside follow vampire logic. No creative solutions need apply. We grind to halt as, obviously, the main characters are safe so long as they don’t invite the vampiric minstrels in, representative of many ways in which black culture and music are appropriated by white musicians. To get the ball rolling, a weakness is found in the once tough-skinned Grace. Overwhelmed with maternal emotion, Grace’s hysteric outburst sacrifices the lives of her friends (and two rather young adults) in a failed attempt to save her own child. (Finally, I wonder what the value of portraying the Chow family was. This necessary intervention to locate Asian American history within the South follows as such: The Chinese immigrant family owns a convenience store, run by entrepreneurial-if-genial parents, with a child one imagines is earnest about her work and studies.) Everyone perishes. Annie, supposedly, did not keep a talisman on herself (like the one protecting Stack). The Lord’s Prayer is useless against Remmick, identified as a subject of the colonization of Ireland by Catholic conversion. Even the guitar is left in tatters.

In the end, the multiplicity of the many threads Coogler spun overwhelm the narrative. The expansive, ambitious scope turns into a shallow treatment of extremely enticing interventions and inventions. As things fall apart, one has to assume that Sammie’s father was right. Sammie’s music leads to the annihilation of his community, not a rejuvenation. When he returns to the church, the camera flinches. Apparently, Sammie did not have much to say to his father or the congregation. As many a bluesman had to do, the boy has skipped town. The inadequacy of this answer necessitates the three addendum endings. Coogler understands that a dialectic between father and son about the morality of the blues was not going to bring major audiences to the theater. Sinners’ most exciting promise (for me at least) was the expectation of watching not one but two Michael B. Jordans curbstomp a crew of racist ass vampires—all the while dressed to the nines. Instead, the swaggering Smoke hardly raises a fist. In the end, Coogler throws us a bone with a much-weakened Stack wiping out anonymous KKK members hitherto largely forgotten by the plot… before bleeding out himself.

What does Sammie get? Second ending: To be a famous blues musician, of course. Wonderful, if it weren’t all to play for strangers exiled from his home.

Our third ending: A conversation between the aged Sammie and the lustrous vampire forms of Mary and Smoke. They now “pass” for human but we (through Sammie) recognize their lost humanity; that, as much as we wish for the greatest things to be immortal (including the blues), each and every truly living thing has its time to go.

I return now to Murray as our guide to a conclusion. Coogler’s film is a masterstroke in its bold representation of bawdy Bacchanalia and the complex currents of Southern black life of the 30s: modernization alongside Jim Crow, World Wars and church gospel. He has indubitably injected life into the tradition of original blockbusters. Instead of landing on an irreparable rift between faith and music, however, Coogler may have transfigured the bluesman in the role of hero. For closing remarks, take Murray’s word: “What the customary blues-idiom dance movement reflects is a disposition to encounter obstacle after obstacle as a matter of course. Such jive expressions as getting with it and taking care of business are references to heroic action.” I only wish the opportunity for resistance had been taken to its fullest without the need to abscond: for blues to have been freedom, real and raw, given the chance to fight evil head on without being obliterated.