Every few weeks I learn something about blues and jazz that reveals yet another previously-unseen detail of Sinners.
This lecture on the influence of the African 6 rhythm on the American Shuffle rhythm by Wynton Marsalis is perhaps one of the coolest music demonstrations I’ve ever heard. And immediately and viscerally, it enriched my listening experience of jazz with history that I’d only understood intellectually before.
What also really struck me was the attraction between slave fiddlers and the Irish jig. After watching Sinners, my friend S pointed out that the Irish used to be persecuted in America too, so there was depth behind the choice to make the vampires Irish.
I decided to rewatch the Irish jig scene in Sinners and I was simply stunned.
(horror warning)
When I first watched the movie, this was the most eerie scene for me.
And yet I was drawn to the moment. This was true horror. Not horror as in jump scares. But horror as in I couldn’t tear my eyes away from how sick and wrong this all was.
And yet so many on YouTube comment about how this song stirs their souls and sense of longing. This is certainly what the lead vampire Remmick felt in the moment, but I was personally so overcome by horror that I was numbed to it.
And yet, on more rewatches, I learned that this song—Rocky Road to Dublin—is a standard of Irish folk music, and the lyrics are quite fascinating. A young Irishman leaves his hometown and family, slightly heartbroken, to seek his fortune (“reap the corn”). Along the way he keeps ghosts and goblins at bay, and finally ending up in Liverpool, he and his country are insulted and he lets his shillelagh fly out in anger. He is finally rescued by fellow Irishmen.
A song of longing for home, bearing humiliation in foreign lands, and, finally, the camaraderie of one’s countrymen.
And all these aspects—the African 6, the evolution to the American Shuffle, the Irish Jig, the Black experience, the Irish experience, the longing, the suffering, the horror, the joy, the rebellion, the envy, the sick and wrongness, the fatal attractions—these are all bundled up in blues and jazz.
There are attractions at play here on many layers.
I wanted to end off with a very powerful quote by Wynton on American music:
Yes the liberated slave was at the heart of the music of freedom, and who better to embody freedom than one who had yearned for it for so long.
Wynton Marsalis