I am asked about my thoughts on the movie Sinners every few weeks. People just like you are wondering, why do the vampires in this movie play Irish music? Why is the villain Irish? Well, potato nation, the story, like most American stories, is complex. Is nuanced. But I will lay the answers out for you as plainly as I can. My name is Melanie Beth Curran, and I specialize in the collection and sharing of the music made by Irish people when they got to America. Because something very interesting happens when an Irish soul reaches these shores. Certain temptations arise. For the vampires in Sinners, those temptations got to the best of them. They became the white, extractive, culture less, unbound, insatiable colonial culture they were once suppressed by. And it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, native, latino, asian. Anyone can become a folk music vampire. Let’s dig the potato field of the past, shall we? 

RESIST

The Irish Vampire in Sinners is an amalgamation, a mixture, a microcosmic representative of all the Irish waves of immigration which came to North America in the decades before the film’s central narrative. I’m talking the first wave, in the mid to late 1700s, constituted of protestant, Scotts-Irish planters, whose existence as colonial dogs in England’s Ulster Plantation was not as rosy as promised. A lot of these newcomers to America settled in Appalachia and the south. They are who many understand as the mountain people who brought traditional anglo Scotts and Irish music to the hills and the hollers. A darker side of their history is the way these newcomers involved themselves in owning plantations and enslaving African people and their descendants. An popular example of a Scotts-Irish plantation diva is Scarlett O’Hara, from Gone with The Wind, whose surname betrays her Irish origins. 

But the Irish in America that most people think of come in the 1800s, and in larger and larger droves by the 1840s, when An Gorta Mór, often called “The Potato Famine”, ravaged existence for the Irish catholic cotier class in Ireland. Those who could get out often made it to places in the North East like New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and then moved westward to places like Chicago, Wisconsin, Montana, California and even Washington State, where my own ancestors settled. This wave of immigrants and the generations which came afterward were the people employed in manual and domestic labor. Most of the “Irish Culture in America” TM is the loud echo of this Catholic immigration wave which lasted into the 1920s with a few more waves in the late 20th century. 

So, history history history. What does this all have to do with Sinners? Well, if the Irish vampire is a concoction of all the Irishness in North America ahead of the 1930s in Mississippi, then this Irish American music vampire has been given two options for nearly two centuries: Resist cultural death, maintain your heritage and music and language, your rituals and traditions, your ties to the ethnic blanket America would put your under, or embrace the opposite of all these things-embrace cultural death, maintain a sense of entertainment through the consumption of music and language, of rituals and traditions. Be not a participant but a consumer. Forget and forgo the ethnic-ness which brought you to this country in the first place. Embrace vampirosity, or resist it by forming coalition, alliance, solidarity with les Damnées de Tèrre, the colonized, the marginalized of the United States, most explicitly, the Black people who are descendants of the enslaved. 

REMEMBER

Even as Remmick, the Irish Vampire in Sinners, goes about his business chomping people around the Juke joint, the memory of his cultural heritage and truth, comes up through him. When he sings The Rocky Road to Dublin, his voice transforms. He does not speak in an American accent anymore, he is returned to an Irish Accent, his vocal home. The story which that song explores is one of roving, of setting out to find one’s fortune or vocation, bearing all the marks of Irishness- brogues-ie shoes, a stout blackthorn to banish ghost and goblin, ie. a stick for walking or fighting, ie. A shillelagh, and a presence which frightens all the dogs on the rocky road to Dublin. 

Some people wonder if the vampire in Sinners is Irish because Irish people in America stole Black music. The answer is a resounding kind of. There is no doubt that Irish people donned black face and deformed in minstrel shows, mocking and portraying Black people. This happened all throughout the 1800s and was a viable means of supporting yourself as a immigrant or a child of immigrants in this new land. What is less often mentioned is how Irish traditions, specifically jig dancing and and fiddling, were elements of the Irish Black Face performance. Irish cultural bits became attributed to Blackness in strange overlaps of performance. The reality, especially in a place like New York City, especially in five points neighborhood but also elsewhere, was that Black and Irish cultures were mixing and fusing in a way that was for them. It wasn’t meant to be entertainment for white America, it wasn’t meant to be spectacle, it wasn’t meant to be a product bought and sold, it - and when I say It I mean the dancing and fiddling culture of shared social spaces between Black and Irish people in the north east - but closed cultural practice for and by each other. 

Many of us are so accustomed to being able to consume or record cultural moments that it’s hard to imagine the act of creativity without its potential audience. The marketing of music in America, especially by the 1932, is literally based on the supposed ethnicity of the performer. There are “race records” and there are “hillbilly records”. Race records are recordings of Black artists, and Hillbilly records are of white artists, who often just repackage Black songs for a white audience. And that’s a winning formula that we still see today. That’s the vampirosity. Sucking Black creativity into white bodies to sell music. But. But. But. At the heart of every vampire, there is a cultural root. Even if you yourself cannot identify the country of your ancestors origin, your ancestors remember you. They are here, if you choose to turn to them.

RESTORE

A vampire like Remmick seems to have no hope of restoration. Once other people are infected by his vampire qualities, they too will approach all music, creative people and creative matter as a products to consume and sell, not as, say, agents of healing and re-connection to the spiritual realm. Music is funny though, because it doesn’t behave neatly as a product. Music and song spans space and time. Music reminds people of old forgotten feelings. How often has an elderly person with a lost memory exuded total clarity in the singing of a song from their past? Letting out word by word, line by line, perfectly as the day the song was born? I’ve seen it myself and I hear stories like that all the time. Music does weird stuff to our memory. It can give someone a sense that others who have long left this earth, are here, right beside us, right now. This is my favorite part of the movie, when the ancestors become apparent and dance alongside the revelers in the Juke Joint. 

I perform the songs of Irish America frequently, and the phenomenon of ancestors appearing is something I am familiar with. Sometimes I will be playing the songs and I will get the sense that the room is full of people. Not just the audience, but the ancestors of audience members. These spirits are wherever the songs are. If people feel emotional listening to the music I perform, I believe it’s because their ancestors are near to them, their presence is felt. Something is restored in the listening to or the singing of old cultural significant music- significant to the root culture or cultures inside of you yourself. For we all came from somewhere. Deep down in your history is a root that connects you to a folk world you can feel, but you don’t know the name of. Or maybe you do know the name. That’s rare. You are rare and you can help us with spiritual, musical restoration and healing. 

In conclusion, I offer this concept: The Irish vampire could possibly reverse his condition and find peace in death through musical restoration. He remembers the songs of Ireland, but he is ill with the modern musical machinations of America. He is seduced into being a land grabber, a white supremacist, and a very dull and boring white folk musician who steals black music. And you, dear member of Potato Nation, may be seduced by the same possibilities. Do not go there. Instead, I entreat you, find your musical restoration. DO not become an Irish American vampire. Learn just one old song from that town you heard mentioned on the tongue of your grandparents. And hey, if you are of Irish extraction, and you don’t know where to start, I have got you covered. 

May I introduce The Melanie Beth Curran Irish American songbook. I wrote this book! It’s called Happy Within and it contains more than 30 songs from Irish America, culled from rare field recording and obscure archives. Some of them are more modern, some are popular, but all will restore your little potato heart. Here You’ll find lyrics and lore. If you like this zine, I have written many other zines which explore niche Irish American topics. 

There is another way to receive your dose of Irish American music history. Subscribe to The Potato Post! Each month I mail out a homemade pamphlet exploring a song or a tune from Irish America. You will learn more than you ever wanted to know about a song’s history and folklore, as well as receiving the chords to start playing the song yourself. In the Potato Post, I use the analytical framework I’ve used here to explore songs: Resist. Remember. Restore. Slán go fóill a charge - Keep digging, and don’t become a vampire.