In Ryan Coogler’s supernatural drama Sinners, the meat comes from twin gangsters Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B Jordan) and the pale blood-sucking vampires, who emerge as a metaphor for white supremacy. The real work of carrying the film’s politics, however, is done by its music: The blues that rise stubbornly, wrapped in grief, gospel, wit, and even defiance.

The impressive score by Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson, who won his third Oscar today (the last two being for Oppenheimer and Black Panther), draws enormously from the musical vocabulary of the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s, the period in which the film is set, when the blues, with its slow bend of guitar strings and plaintive notes, wasn’t just entertainment. The blues, in its music and lyrics, in every twang and every riff, also bore the weight of segregation, the racial apartheid imposed by the Jim Crow laws. Gorranson travelled the “blues trail” with Coogler and his father, a blues guitarist, immersing himself in the landscape and culture that shaped the genre.

But the trail leads further back. The genre has its origins in the centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, when millions of Africans were forcibly brought to the US. The little that they brought along included their musical traditions and some instruments that........

© Indian Express