The Blues We Carried: What 'Sinners' Teaches Us About Ancestral Memory

scene from the film "Sinners"

Part 1/3

Ryan Coogler stood in a cotton field in Byron, Georgia on November 17, 2021, and realized he'd never done this before. At thirty-five years old, born and raised in the Bay Area, descended from people who fled Mississippi during the Great Migration — he'd never actually stood in a cotton field. The proximity felt wrong. The distance felt worse. His ancestors 100 years removed. His ancestors 400 years removed. All of it right there in his hands as he took something from that field: a piece of cotton, a piece of memory.

That same day, Young Dolph was murdered in Memphis.

This is how Sinners was born. Not from a pitch meeting or a genre exercise, but from grief stacked on grief stacked on guilt stacked on the realization that sometimes you have to go back to move forward.

Ryan Coogler's Sinners hit theaters and immediately became the kind of film people couldn't stop talking about. On the surface, it's a vampire film set in 1930s Mississippi. But if you think that's all it is, you've missed the entire point. This isn't horror for horror's sake. This is a reckoning. This is Ryan Coogler doing the archaeological work of digging up everything we were taught to bury about ourselves — our music, our magic, our relationship to the sacred and the profane — and saying, "Actually, this right here? This is what saved us."

I'm breaking this down across three essays because there's too much here to process in one sitting. Today, we're talking about inheritance: what we brought with us from Africa, what we created in the American South, and what they tried to make us forget. Part two will examine the current crisis and how Sinners responds to what's being done to us right now. Part three will explore what we're building in response: the renaissance happening in real time.

But first, we have to understand the roots.

The Uncle Who Held the South

Ryan Coogler comes from a very specific lineage. His Uncle James was born and raised in Mississippi, then fled to Oakland in his twenties. This is what we call the second wave of the Great Migration: black folks who left the South seeking freedom, opportunity, and distance from the violence that defined southern Black life in the early-to-mid twentieth century.

Coogler's family, like so many of our families, is a Great Migration story. His parents couldn't afford to buy a house in Oakland, so they moved to Richmond, which is essentially to Oakland what Queens is to Brooklyn. And like so many of us, young Ryan had an elder in his life who carried the South with him wherever he went.

Uncle James would come home from work and do two things: listen to San Francisco Giants games and play blues records on vinyl. For young Ryan, obsessed with rap and R&B like any kid of his generation, the blues was just background noise. It was old people music. It was something that was, not something that is.

But here's what we all eventually learn if we're lucky: the elders are holding something for us. They're keeping it warm until we're ready to understand what it means.

In 2015, Uncle James passed away while Ryan was making Creed. Ryan was in Philadelphia for most of his uncle's illness, then had to go to Los Angeles for post-production. He got the call that his uncle had died while he was picture locking the film. And in that hallway in some production facility in LA, Ryan had the realization so many of us have had: What the fuck am I doing? I'm not at home with my people.

He couldn't make it back for what mattered. And when grief hit, Ryan did what so many of us do: he reached for music. But this time, he reached for his uncle's music. He started playing blues records. And something happened that he didn't expect.

"When I would listen to them," Ryan said, "it was like if I closed my eyes like he was there with me. The power of music to be able to do that."

That's conjuring. That's ancestral connection. That's what the music has always been for.

The whole time he was making this film, Ryan said, "I was trying to make a movie that he would get a kick out of."

The Church-to-Blues Pipeline Nobody Wants to Talk About

Ryan spent years researching the Delta Blues for this film, diving deep into texts like Leroi Jones's Blues People (Jones would later change his name to Amiri Baraka) and Robert Palmer's Deep Blues. What he found was a genealogy that most people don't know about

or deliberately ignore.

It started with a man named Charlie Patton on the Dockery Farms plantation in Mississippi, where they believe the first true Delta Blues song was played. From there came Tommy Johnson, who was the first musician to claim he'd sold his soul to the devil to learn how to play. Then came Robert Johnson, who made that story famous. And there was Son House, who outlived them all.

But here's the part that matters: almost every single one of these legendary blues musicians didn't just come out of the church — their fathers were preachers.

Let me say that again for the people in the back: the men who created what we know as the blues were preachers' sons.

Son House himself lived in this perpetual cycle: five years drinking and playing blues music, then five years sober and preaching. Then back to five years of blues, then ten years sober running his own church. He was literally embodying the tension between the sacred and the profane, the church and the juke joint, the spirit and the flesh.

And here's what Ryan figured out that changes everything: that tension isn't actually a tension at all. It's only a tension if you accept the framework that Christianity imposed on us.

In blues music, Ryan explained, "there's no mind, body, and metaphysical separation. In the church concept there often is the flesh is the enemy. In blues the flesh is a part of it."

Blues acknowledges: my back hurts from picking cotton all day. My feet hurt. I'm hungry. I'm sexy. I want this woman. She wants me. I want to move. There's no separation between the spiritual and the physical, between the sacred and the sensual.

It's all one thing.

It's all life.

It's all divine.

But Christianity, as it was weaponized during slavery and Jim Crow, taught us that our bodies were sinful. Our desires were sinful. Our music that celebrated those bodies and desires? That was the devil's music.

And you know what's wild? Blues was called "the devil's music" not because of the hip swiveling or the sexuality. It was called the devil's music because when it was time for Sunday offering, the congregation didn't have as much money because they'd spent it on drinks at the juke joint the night before.

The same people going to church on Sunday were at the juke joint on Saturday. Blues was competition for the collection plate. That's it. That's the whole story.

The "devil's music" was an economic anxiety dressed up as moral panic.

What We Knew Before They Taught Us to Forget

There's a woman named Blue Telusma — an emotional intelligence coach who is Haitian and Cuban — who broke down something essential about this film. She said: "When enslaved Africans were brought to North America, a lot of them had a lot of really powerful, magical ancestral DNA in their bellies. That ancestral DNA is what created the Haitian Revolution. That ancestral DNA is what empowered Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman and everybody else to fight for freedom."

Blue comes from a lineage of what she calls Cuban witches. And she's right to reclaim that word, even though it makes people uncomfortable. Because here's the thing: if you'd heard someone say "I come from a long line of Cuban witches" a thousand years ago, before colonization, before forced conversion, before the demonization of indigenous spiritual practices — you would have clapped. You would have understood that meant her ancestral DNA was intact. Her spirit of revolution, her spirit of integrity, her commitment to protecting her family and community — all of that was tied to that lineage.

But Christianity taught us to fear it. More specifically, the version of Christianity that was used as a tool of colonization and control taught us to fear the very thing that might save us.

Blue put it plainly: "The same God that made me black made me a witch."

And when you watch Sinners, you see Ryan Coogler doing the work of reclaiming that magic. The character of Annie, the root worker, the woman who understands hoodoo; she's not the villain. She's not the one to fear. She's the one trying to save everybody. She's the backbone.

Because in the film, Christianity doesn't save them. The Lord's Prayer doesn't save them.

You know what saves them?

The old ways. The hidden knowledge. The magic we carried from the motherland that they tried to beat out of us in church pews.

Blue told a story about her first spiritual experience. She was five years old. Her mother had been crying in her room for days. Blue went to sleep and her grandmother — who had died twenty years before Blue was even born — sent her a message in a dream.

The grandmother told Blue to tell her mother: I'm proud of you, everything's going to be okay, stop crying over that man, his only purpose was to bring you a child, now that he served his purpose you can let him go.

"Mind you, I'm talking about my own damn daddy," Blue said. "My first message, my daddy caught a stray."

Five-year-old Blue woke up and told her mother: "Grandma has a message." And with the level of specificity that stopped her mother in her tracks, Blue delivered the message verbatim. Her mother's eyes welled up with tears, she said thank you, and went to her room.

"That was the first reading I ever did at 5 years old," Blue said. "That is the spirit of how black witches work. We more often than not are the ones who are here trying to save our people. We are not evil. We are not demons."

The Irish Vampire and the Cycle of Colonization

There's a moment in the film where one of the vampires, an Irish man, hears someone recite the Lord's Prayer as protection. And he responds: "That's what they said to me when they took my land."

The vampire is Irish. Ireland was colonized by the British. The British used Christianity as a tool of that colonization. And here's this Irish vampire, himself a victim of extraction and colonization, now repeating that same pattern of violence against Black folks in Mississippi.

Ryan researched the Abhartach — an Irish term for what's arguably the real Dracula, before Bram Stoker (an Irish journalist) relocated the story to Eastern Europe and turned it into the Vlad narrative we know. Ryan wanted to show how colonization creates cycles. How the colonized, when they gain power, can become colonizers. How Christianity itself has been plumped down (Ryan's exact words) on communities around the world, and what happened?

Violence. Extraction. The destruction of indigenous knowledge.

Delroy Lindo, who plays Delta in the film, said: "If you look at when Christianity was plumped down on the African continent, what the fuck happened? Everywhere."

Songs That Nobody Knows Who Wrote

Here's something else Ryan discovered in his research: the further back you go in blues history, the more you find songs that nobody knows who wrote. You'll find a song and think, "Okay, Howlin' Wolf was the first to record 'Smokestack Lightning.'" But then you dig deeper and find a recording from twenty years earlier—Willie Lofton's "Dark Roll Blues"—using the same imagery, the same concept. And you realize: this isn't about individual ownership. This is communal music.

"At this time," Ryan explained, "there was no 'this is my song, these are my rights'— there was no owner because we were people. We were people that came from a place where that's not how shit worked. Music was not to be bought and sold. It was a way of life."

Music was healing. Music was communal. Music was the thread that connected us to each other and to the ancestors and to the divine. It wasn't property. It couldn't be owned.

But the moment capitalism entered — the moment we started trying to sell it — we were already putting the concept of ownership and transfers onto something that was meant to be free.

We were turning a system of healing into property. And we were doing it to a people that had been turned into property. On land that was someone else's land that had now been turned into property.

Do you see the layers? Property on top of property on top of property. And the music — our healing, our joy, our connection to the divine — became just one more thing to be extracted and sold.

The Lineage of the Orator

Ryan traces a direct line that most of us feel but maybe haven't articulated: from the African griot (the storyteller, the keeper of oral history) to the Black preacher (with that musicality, that animation, that call-and-response that Martin Luther King Jr. made famous) to the blues singer to the rapper standing on a stage today.

It's the same thing. It's always been the same thing.

The African orator tradition survived the Middle Passage. It survived slavery. It survived Jim Crow. It survived everything they did to us. Because you can beat a people, you can enslave a people, you can try to rob them of their language and their religion and their culture, but the music? The music lives in the body. The music gets passed down in ways that are harder to kill.

"The musicality of the black preacher," Ryan said, "most known with Martin Luther King Jr. —the animation. That's all from the continent, but it was deeply refined in the American South."

And what Ryan understood — what makes Sinners so powerful — is that this inheritance isn't just historical. It's active. It's present. It's living in us right now, whether we acknowledge it or not.

What We're Actually Watching

So when you sit down to watch Sinners, understand what you're actually watching. You're not just watching vampires in Mississippi. You're watching Ryan Coogler's love letter to his Uncle James, to the blues musicians who were called sinners for playing music that felt too good, to the root workers who saved communities while being called devils, to everyone who carried the old ways forward despite being told those ways were evil.

You're watching him excavate our inheritance.

And here's why that matters: we can't build a future if we don't know what we're building from. We can't reclaim our power if we don't know where that power comes from. We can't be whole if we keep rejecting the parts of ourselves we were taught to fear.

Sinners is doing the work of recovery. Of archaeology. Of saying: look at what they buried.

Look at what they told you was shameful.

Look at what they called demonic.

Now look again.

See it for what it actually is.

See it as inheritance.

Until next time,

Tricky Sol

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In Part 2, we'll examine what's been done to that inheritance—the ongoing extraction, the current crisis, and how Sinners holds up a mirror to the violence of right now. Because this film isn't just about the past. It's about what's happening to us today, in this moment, under these specific conditions. And once you see that, you can't unsee it.

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Sources & Further Research

This essay draws from multiple interviews and panel discussions:

1. Ryan Coogler interview with The Breakfast Club (2025) - Detailed discussion of Uncle James, the cotton field moment, blues research methodology, and the Great Migration family history.

   
   

2. Ryan Coogler interview with unidentified journalist - Deep dive into blues history, music as property vs. communal practice, and the church-to-blues pipeline.

   
   

3. Delroy Lindo interview with Face Magazine - Analysis of Christianity's violent imposition on Africa, the Lord's Prayer scene, and the sacred/profane dichotomy.

   
   

4. Blue Telusma Instagram Live "Free Game" session - Framework on Black witches as angels not demons, ancestral DNA and revolution, and spiritual practice vs. religious dogma.

   
   

5. Cast & Crew Panel Discussion (SAG screening) - Background on Ryan's research process and creative intentions.

   
   

For those wanting to do their own research, Ryan cited two essential texts: Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People and Robert Palmer, Deep Blues. The history of Delta Blues musicians — Charlie Patton, Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson, and Son House — is well documented in blues scholarship and worth exploring.