Mississippi Delta Blues – Memphis Flyer

Ryan Coogler has proven himself to be one of the great masters of genre films. Every time he’s tried a new kind of film, he has mastered it and made it better. In 2015, he made the Rocky spin-off Creed, starring his friend and frequent collaborator Michael B. Jordan as the son of Rocky’s frenemy Apollo Creed. It was, incredibly, better received than Sylvester Stallone’s attempt to revitalize the inspirational sports picture he had pioneered. Remember 2005’s Rocky Balboa? Of course you don’t.

Then Coogler moved on to the superhero space with Black Panther, the consensus choice for the best chapter of the never-ending Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Coogler saw the potential of his star Chadwick Boseman to transcend the shallow and banal crash-bang and become a hero for the people. And I’m not just talking about Black people, who were finally able to see on-screen both a hero and a culture which looked like them. T’Challa was the MCU’s moral center, the person who took time to wrestle with the right and wrongs of the situation, rather than just punching the bad guys. Marvel’s vision of good leadership is not the American President Thaddeus Ross, a barely reformed war criminal, or Tony Stark, the technocratic billionaire. It’s T’Challa, the King of Wakanda, who prioritizes justice for all humanity and puts his nation’s (and his own) blood and treasure on the line to achieve it.

Now, Coogler ventures into the horror genre with Sinners. The 21st-century superhero film cannibalizes genres so they can be digested by the corporate body. Captain America: Winter Soldier was a ’70s paranoid thriller in colorful tights; Guardians of the Galaxy is a sci-fi adventure with the occasional super-heroic flourish. Even Black Panther more closely resembled The Adventures of Robin Hood than it did Thor: The Dark World. The horror genre gives its practitioners more freedom. Throw in an atmosphere of creeping dread, a few jump scares, and a little monstrosity, and you can call it horror. After all, this is a genre that encompasses both David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

Coogler takes the opportunity to play fast and loose in Sinners, bringing in elements from all over the cinematic map. One of its biggest influences is Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, a decidedly not-horror psychological portrait of two deeply damaged people trying to find themselves in the squalor of North Mississippi. Another major tributary is Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, the vampire neo-Western that provided Bill Paxton’s finest hour. If I had to pin it down, I would call Sinners folk horror. Like The Wicker Man and Midsommar, it finds terror in the inscrutable laws of pre-Christian pagan beliefs.

The film’s animated preamble introduces us to the concept, handed down over millennia through dozens of different cultures, of shamanistic figures whose music-making was so powerful that it became magic and temporarily tore the veil between our world and the spirit world. We then meet Sammie Moore (Miles Caton). It’s October 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and times are tough. Sammie’s a preacher’s son who quotes scripture from the pulpit on Sunday morning after playing the blues on Charley Patton’s resonator guitar on Saturday night.

Against the wishes of his pa, who warns him against “playing music for drunkards who shirk their responsibilities,” Sammie takes a gig at the Delta’s newest venue, Club Duke. The owners are the Smokestack twins, Smoke and Stack, both played by Jordan. They left Clarksdale 15 years earlier to fight in World War I, then joined the Great Migration to Chicago, where they became enforcers for Al Capone’s Prohibition smuggling operation. After years of being good soldiers, they have unexpectedly returned to the Delta, throwing cash around and sitting on enough bootleg booze to stock a juke joint for months. How they came into this good fortune is one of the film’s early mysteries.

The twins buy a former cotton warehouse and proceed to get the band back together, Blues Brothers-style. Along with Sammie, they recruit piano pounder Delta Slim (the great Delroy Lindo) and the singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) for opening night. It is one hell of a party. Every drunken shirker in a three-county radius packs into the run-down old building to party their butts off late into the night.

Did I mention that Sinners is also kind of a musical? And that some of the music was recorded here in Memphis by Boo Mitchell at Royal Studios? Coogler frames the big emotional moments with musical numbers performed by his cast. On Club Duke’s opening night, Sammie’s songs whip the revelers into a frenzy of ecstatic dancing. When people from other eras start to appear in the barn, from a masked San shaman of Kalahari to Eddie Hazel decked out in Parliament-Funkadelic-era Afro and star-shaped sunglasses, we know we’re through the looking glass.

The revelers are mostly oblivious, but someone notices the magic working. Remmick (Jack O’Connell) appears, smoldering from the sunlight. He’s an Irishman of indeterminate age, who knows all the old Appalachian folk songs. When he and his little band show up at Club Duke, the door man Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) won’t let them in. Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke’s ex-wife, is a secret voodoo priestess who recognizes the undead when she sees them. But it’s going to take more than a mojo bag and a trunk full of guns to defeat the devils this time.

Sinners spends a long time giving backstory to its sprawling cast, so that when the action kicks in, we feel each loss and setback. Coogler takes big swings, but not all of them connect. Jordan’s double duty as twins could have been a disaster, but he pulls it off with bravado. On the other hand, a half-assed subplot involving the Klan bogs things down in the final reel. It hardly matters. Sinners is one of our great filmmakers exploring the outer limits of his gifts. Let Coogler cook.

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Monday, March 21 will mark the 120th year since the birth of Edward James “Son” House Jr. in Lyon, Mississippi, just north of Clarksdale. And just in time to celebrate one of the most stirring voices in blues history, today witnesses the release an album of previously unheard recordings by House on Easy Eye Sound, Forever On My Mind.

The bluesman’s distinctive vocals, paired with guitar licks that feel like he clawed them out of the earth itself, won House much acclaim during the blues Renaissance of the 1960s, when many artists were brought out of obscurity. After Folkways Records re-released House’s original 1930s tracks on Blues from the Mississippi Delta in 1963, Columbia Records made new studio recordings for its 1965 album, Father of Folk Blues, and House’s profile grew exponentially. He was even featured on the cover of Newsweek at the time.

But Forever On My Mind represents the time in between those two records, when Son House was rediscovering himself. In 1964, blues enthusiasts Dick Waterman, Nick Perls, and Phil Spiro tracked House down in Rochester, New York, but the then 62-year-old musician had not performed for decades. Yet he was persuaded, under Waterman’s management, to undertake a series of performances at folk music festivals and college campuses around the country that year.

After one such performance at Indiana’s Wabash College was recorded, the tapes were given to Waterman, and he sat on them for decades before Easy Eye Sound acquired them (along with many other tapes from Waterman’s collection). Now, released on the new album, they are a revelation.

Notably, the recordings transcend the limitations of most live performances on tape, being devoid of crowd noise, banter or other distractions. They sound as intimate as studio recordings, yet with a rawness and spontaneity that outshine the Columbia sessions of five months later.

If you’ve thrilled at the rugged descending bass figures of House’s “Empire State Express” from the Columbia album, listen to the version here for a rendition even more gutsy, as the guitarist’s hands seem to pull the notes from stone, his voice testifying with spiritual fervor.

The same could be said for nearly all these tracks, even if other versions have been known for years. Five of the eight songs heard on Forever on My Mind were represented in other forms on House’s Columbia LP. Another two songs, his versions of Charley Patton’s “Pony Blues” and the gospel blues standard “Motherless Children,” were recorded by the label but went unreleased until 1992.

The eighth number heard on the Easy Eye Sound release, the titular “Forever on My Mind,” was never attempted in a recording studio, though there is film footage of him playing it at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival. The version heard on the new album borrows from Willie Brown’s classic “Future Blues” and House’s own “Louise McGhee,” true to the improvisatory Delta blues tradition.

Son House, ca. 1964. (Photo courtesy Easy Eye Sound)

All in all, the album reflects a sharp musical focus that diminished in House’s later concert appearances and recordings. Waterman notes in a press release that “as [Son House] toured in ’65 and ’66 and ’67, he developed stories — they were self-deprecating stories, with humor and things like that. So, he became sort of an entertainer. But these first shows in ’64 were the plain, naked, raw Son House. This was just the man and his performance. He didn’t have any stories or anything to go with it.”

For Easy Eye Sound founder Dan Auerbach (of the Black Keys), this release has a personal dimension. “Easy Eye Sound makes blues records,” he notes, “and not many people make blues records anymore. This record continues where we started off, with our artists Leo Bud Welch and Jimmy ‘Duck’ Holmes and Robert Finley. It also is part of my history — some of the first blues music I heard was Son House. I was raised on his Columbia LP, Father of Folk Blues. My dad had that album and would play it in the house when I was a kid, so I know all those songs by heart.”

Hearing Waterman’s tapes for the first time, Auerbach was galvanized. “He sounds like he’s in a trance, and his singing is so nuanced here. He’s very playful with his phrasing, just right on the money with his singing and playing. It sounds so right to me — top form Son House.”