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By James Thomas
Dear listeners,
I’m James, a software engineer with The New York Times’s interactive news desk and an occasional contributor to Culture. I cajoled my way into this space this week after being captivated by the musical ideas pulsing through “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending vampire flick that’s also a tone poem about Black love and pain, and the power and cost of Black creativity.
In an arresting scene, a transcendent blues musician plays so fiercely, he summons ancestors and progeny to a Mississippi juke joint in 1932. Suddenly and seamlessly, Jim Crow-era sharecroppers, B-boys from the ’90s, Chinese folk dancers, African griots and funk musicians from the ’70s are all together, reveling to the same kinetic sound. It’s a visual expression of Black music’s shared DNA.
My girlfriend and I spent all weekend analyzing that scene, pondering the blues’ connections to what came before and since. Here are 11 songs I could imagine on the set list at a supernatural juke joint unbounded by technology, geography or time.
If he don’t dig this, he got a hole in his soul,
James
Listen along while you read.
1. Albert King: “Cold Feet”
This infectious stomper from 1967 would set a warm vibe early in the interdimensional party, satisfying fans of the Mississippi-born blues luminary and the ’90s hip-hop heads who’d recognize it as the foundation of Chubb Rock’s “Just the Two of Us.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Carolina Chocolate Drops: “Snowden’s Jig (Genuine Negro Jig)”
In a sense, the string band Carolina Chocolate Drops did travel through time, bringing this billowing folk song forward some hundred years to its album “Genuine Negro Jig” in 2010 and renaming it for the seminal Black string musicians the Snowden Family Band. That’s Rhiannon Giddens on fiddle. She’s one of several modern-day blues stewards who helped make the music in “Sinners.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. The RH Factor featuring D’Angelo: “I’ll Stay”
The trumpeter Roy Hargrove was known for his pristine phrasing in traditional jazz settings. But on his album of genre gumbo from 2003, he makes his horn wail like a bluesman’s guitar in this cover of a Funkadelic ballad that was itself a love letter to the blues. The venerable session guitarist Chalmers Alford, known as Spanky, steals the show mid-song.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Fela Kuti and Afrika 70: “Sorrow Tears and Blood”
In a departure from the horn-forward Afrobeat anthems Fela Kuti is known for, the mid-tempo guitar picking that opens and anchors this song evokes a banjo. His description of the raid and destruction of his home by the Nigerian Army in 1977 is in the blues tradition of spinning personal grief into catharsis: “Some people lost some bread / Some people just die / Them leave sorrow, tears and blood.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Outkast featuring Sleepy Brown and Jazze Pha: “Bowtie”
The duo’s 2003 double album, “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,” yielded an avalanche of singles that dominated radio and clubs and eclipsed this slick two-stepper. Its jubilant horns and seismic bass line can easily get a room of joyful, sweaty dancers on their feet.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Cécile McLorin Salvant: “Optimistic Voices/No Love Dying”
Like Sammie, the epicenter of “Sinners,” the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant conjures spirits with her perfect pitch and musical curiosity. Don’t be fooled by the folksy rendering from the “Wizard of Oz” soundtrack that starts the medley. With strategic disharmony and the word “open,” she soon unlocks a smoldering cover of Gregory Porter’s “No Love Dying.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. Joi featuring Sleepy Brown: “Lick”
They’ve dimmed the lights at our imagined party, and folks are sweaty and swaying, skin-on-skin. Joi’s supple, powerful voice echoes Betty Wright, Candi Staton and Ann Peebles, Southern songstresses who emphasize the blues in R&B. The title of this siren call from 2002 is relevant to a conversation between two of the movie’s main characters after one of them seeks romantic advice. Lust is as integral to the blues as heartache.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Leon Bridges: “Bad Bad News”
Is there any proof that Leon Bridges was not actually transported here from a century ago by the power of music? It’s not this buttery humblebrag that blends country and jazz aesthetics. “They tell me I was born to lose,” Bridges sings. “But I made a good, good thing out of bad, bad news.” He’s a Texan, but he talks like a Delta bluesman here.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Tom Misch featuring Jordan Rakei: “Wake Up This Day”
A key point of tension in the movie is how the Black protagonists, traumatized by slavery and Jim Crow, protect their restorative space from outsiders who’ve been drawn by their bittersweet artistry. They become literal gatekeepers, only admitting a few trusted guests. I reckon they’d let in the guitarist Tom Misch, a white Brit who wears influences like Jimi Hendrix and J Dilla on his sleeve. With crooning from the New Zealand native Jordan Rakei, this bouncy concoction shows flashes of hip-hop and the Black church.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
10. The Mighty Clouds of Joy: “He’ll Fix It for You”
“Sinners” deeply considers its characters’ spiritual morass, in which blues and gospel have been perceived as opposites for as long as they’ve coexisted. This song from the Clouds’ 2010 album “At the Revival” demonstrates they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. It was produced by the soul master Raphael Saadiq, who in addition to being another of the movie’s music producers, has worked with most of the living musicians in this list.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
11. D’Angelo: “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker”
You’ve heard this tale of betrayal and wrath before, and the links below are to that original version. But to really span eras within a single song, please listen to the rendition from D’Angelo’s 2000 performance in Stockholm, where he embodies Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and George Clinton and manages to make the album version sound even more sinister. “Why the both of you’s bleeding so much?” he growls. In a vampire movie, the answer is complicated.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“The Blues Continuum: Songs for ‘Sinners’” track list
Track 1: Albert King, “Cold Feet”
Track 2: Carolina Chocolate Drops, “Snowden’s Jig (Genuine Negro Jig)”
Track 3: The RH Factor featuring D’Angelo, “I’ll Stay”
Track 4: Fela Kuti and Afrika 70, “Sorrow Tears and Blood”
Track 5: Outkast featuring Sleepy Brown and Jazze Pha, “Bowtie”
Track 6: Cécile McLorin Salvant, “Optimistic Voices/No Love Dying”
Track 7: Joi featuring Sleepy Brown, “Lick”
Track 8: Leon Bridges, “Bad Bad News”
Track 9: Tom Misch featuring Jordan Rakei, “Wake Up This Day”
Track 10: The Mighty Clouds of Joy, “He’ll Fix It for You”
Track 11: D’Angelo, “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker”
James Thomas is a software engineer in the Interactive News department, a team that creates tools used by reporters and editors to produce Times journalism.
The post An Ode to the Blues’ Many Guises, Inspired by ‘Sinners’ appeared first on New York Times.
