The Mississippi town behind the box office hit Sinners

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The Mississippi town behind the box office hit Sinners

Ana Faguy

BBC News

Reporting fromClarksdale, Mississippi

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When Edna Nicole Luckett sings the Blues on the stage at Red’s, her voice, deep and soulful, echoes against the walls. The juke joint in Clarksdale, Mississippi is one of the last of its kind in the region, a landmark for a bygone era of American music.

“I was raised in Delta dirt, sunshine and flatland that goes on for miles and miles,” she sings, as people nod their heads and stomp their feet to the beat.

Ms Luckett, like many who were raised in the Mississippi Delta, grew up listening to locally-crafted Blues music and singing in her church choir. It’s experiences like hers – and places like Red’s – that are getting a fresh moment to shine with the box office success of Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners.

The genre-defying film has earned more than $300 million (£22 million) globally, against a $90m (£67m) budget, and attracted the world’s attention to a historic small town.

For the those who live there – and especially those who still sing the Blues – the spotlight is welcome, in no small part because of Coogler’s careful respect for their history.

“I’m protective of how the Mississippi Delta is represented,” Ms Luckett said.

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The movie is getting six free screenings in Clarksdale, thanks to a local campaign

Clarksdale in the spotlight

Clarksdale was the place where blues legends like Sam Cooke, Johnny Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters got their start, but its significance was mostly known to music lovers.

Like other small towns in the US south, Clarksdale has faced struggles. The town, home to 14,000 people, lost its only movie theatre in 2003. That meant that residents couldn’t even watch Sinners in their hometown – until now. After a local appeal, Mr Coogler agreed to bring the film to town for six free showings this past week.

The charge was led by Tyler Yarbrough, a Clarksdale native, who wrote a public letter to the director after seeing the movie in a nearby town. Set in 1932, Sinners tells the story of twin brothers, both played by Michael B Jordan, who return home to Clarksdale after World War One. Combining elements of musicals, horror and ******* drama, the movie fuses vampire lore with meticulous historic research about that time and place in America.

“Beneath the horror and fantasy, your film captures the soul of this place: our history, our struggles, our genius, our joy, our community,” Mr Yarbrough wrote.

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Ryan Coogler travelled to Clarksdale to present free screenings of his film

He told the BBC he was moved to see this place represented with careful detail.

“It was time traveling back to 1930’s in Clarksdale, in our town, so this is the lives of my great grandma,” he said. “The history from the farms to the juke joints was on full display.”

Mr Coogler, who also made ****** Panther and Creed, said it was his Uncle James, a Mississippi native who loved Delta Blues, who helped inspire the film.

Although the movie was ultimately filmed in Louisiana, he visited Clarksdale to do extensive research.

“I never got to come here until working on this script,” Mr Coogler told a crowd of 1,500 on Thursday. “It blew my mind — I got to meet musicians, I got to meet community members. It really changed me just to come here and do the research.”

A changing town embraces its roots

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Mural on the side of Delta Blues Alley Cafe in Clarksdale

While some remnants of the town depicted in the film remain, like many towns in America, its storefronts have been emptied and modernised – though it still enjoys tourist interest for its history.

Odes to some of Clarksdale’s blues legends, like Robert Johnson, are colourfully painted onto the sides of buildings, reminding people of the history of the streets where they walk.

One of those streets used to be home to Delta Blues Alley Cafe, a blues joint owned by Jecorry Miller that burned to the ground last month.

Mr Miller wants people to have a better understanding of the history that lives on the streets on Clarksdale and the movie is a way to grasp that.

“The movie itself is going to be great for the town – we get nine times the population of our city that comes to visit the city every year, now it could be ten or 11 times the population that visits Clarksdale,” Mr Miller said. “People being here spending their dollars is a great thing for us.”

And local residents said the attention is all the more welcome because they see themselves and their culture in the film.

At the Thursday screening, longtime Clarksdale residents relished the details.

Ms Luckett, the Blues singer, was listening to make sure the characters’ dialect sounded right. She watched to see if the land in the backdrop of the film was as flat and green as it is in real life.

“It was,” she said with a smile.

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