Langston Hughes’s Blues Vision in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners: A Special Issue of The Langston Hughes Review
updated:
Tuesday, June 10, 2025 - 10:19am
Tony Bolden
deadline for submissions:
Monday, August 4, 2025
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a quintessential blues narrative composed for the twenty-first century. The film embodies perspectives commonly found in blues-oriented expression, including songs, autobiographies, and interviews, not to mention Black fiction and poetry that thematizes and/or reflects blues-oriented music and blues criticism as well. But before academic scholars considered blues worthy of analysis, Langston Hughes wrote critically and creatively about blues music and the suffusion of its principles throughout much of Black expressive culture. In fact, he first observed a blues performance in his early teens, well before Mamie Smith’s recording “Crazy Blues” (1920) launched the classic blues era.