‘Sinners’ Shows Clarksdale’s Past. What’s Next for the Birthplace of the Blues?

‘Sinners’ Shows Clarksdale’s Past. What’s Next for the Birthplace of the Blues?

CLARKSDALE, MISS. – Tyler Yarbrough makes it clear. Sinners and the cultural fest that followed may have thrust Clarksdale into the national spotlight, but this moment represents the culmination of years of hard-fought progress. In as little as three weeks, community members, more than a dozen sponsors, and partners planned and executed Clarksdale Culture Capital’s Sinners fest on May 29-31. It wouldn’t have happened if residents weren’t already…

Bobby Harrison: ‘Sinners’ and the Blues used to tell epic story of the Great Migration

Blues music has long been linked to the mystical or supernatural. After all, the seminal Blues tale is of legend Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads of U.S. Highways 49 and 61 in the Delta to be able to play a guitar like no one else. In the movie “Sinners,” set in 1932 Clarksdale in the very Delta town where Johnson is rumored to have made that faustian bargain, those mystical connections are taken to a whole new leve…