The Sound of the Soul: The Connection of Past, Present, and Future through Music in Ryan Coogler's Sinners
Sinners is a film set in 1932, in the Jim Crow era Mississippi Delta. The 1930’s were a time of economic depression and tumultuous race relations and these are themes that are central to this film. The movie follows the journey of two twins, Elias and Elijah Moore, also known as Smoke and Stack, who are both played by Micheal B. Jordan. The twins are traveling back to their hometown of Clarksdale, Missississpi, after serving in WWI and working with gangs in Chicago. They return from Chicago smuggling Irish beer and Italian wine and bring plenty of cash. With that money the SmokeStack twins seek to open up a juke joint and get into the bootlegging industry which they hope will bring them big profits. They buy an old sawmill from an older white man named Hogwood, and from there gather musicians, cooks, and others in preparation for the juke’s opening night. What they don’t know is that as the sun sets, an evil force lurks in the darkness.
I don’t want to spoil too much so I will leave it at that. What I would really like to focus on is one particular character, one particular song, and one particular scene.
Preacher Boy
On their way to Clarksdale, the twins pick up their cousin Sammie Moore, also known as Preacher Boy (Miles Caton). Preacher Boy is the son of a pastor (hence the name Preacher Boy) and comes from a family of sharecroppers. He possesses the divine gift of musicality and an unshakable love for the blues. Despite his father’s disapproval of his music (basically saying that the blues is the devils music) Sammie cannot deny himself his passion. He leaves the church to go play at Smoke and Stacks juke joint, saying that he will be back to the church in the morning. Sammies character is integral to the metaphor of musicality in the film. His powerful singing abilities are what Smoke and Stack need to bring business to the juke joint and consequently bring danger to the community.This is not Sammie’s fault however, evil forces are attracted to his musical gifts because he possess something they others don’t: Soul, ancestral wisdom, and true powers of connection that transcend time and space.
Towards the beginning of the film there is a narration by Annie (Wummie Mosaku) that explains the cultural significance of the narrators of oral traditions. These narrators are storytellers, singers, poets, and are guided by ancestral memories. The narrator says that these storytellers exist in many cultures around the world. In Ireland they are called Filídh, the Choctaw call them Fire Keepers and in West Africa they are called Griots.
Sammie’s singing is not just powerful, but ancestral, because Sammie is a Griot. Because he possesses this ancestral gift, when he sings he has the ability to create a bridge or remove the barrier between the living and the dead.
“I Lied to You” Juke Joint Scene
This scene is the scene which made me certain that I had to watch the movie again, just to feel the hairs on my arms stand up once more. Sammie’s true power as Griot is best seen in this sequence. He begins by humming, through the deep guttural sound of the blues you can feel the pain and beauty of the Black South, of its people. It is the same core vibrational hum that Delta Slim performs after talking about the lynching of his close friend. It is the humming of resistance and community. Delta Slim says “Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion, we brought this from home. It’s magic what we do, it's sacred and big”. Sammie’s singing, paired with rhythmic stomping, piano, and the Delta Blues resonator guitar, have the beloved sound of the blues. Slowly the blues begins to fade and blend into the sounds of gospel, rock and roll, hip-hop, djing, trap, African tribal drums, and futuristic electric guitar. The camera pans throughout the audience, where people from past, future, and present dance. There are African tribal dancers, Chinese Xiqu dancers (the ancestors of Grace and Bo Chow), Black ballerinas, Southern girls twerking to the beat, breakdancers, and a Jimi Hendrix-esque figure shredding on an electric guitar. This transcendence is so powerful that the roof begins to light on fire, but amidst the flames the music continues and they all still dance. In a blog on Medium, Titled “I Lied to You”, written by user ganpy, the blogger says that:
“Historically, the burning of juke joints or churches during the Jim Crow era was an act of racial terrorism. Here, Coogler reclaims that fire, turning it into a metaphor for the unyielding power of art. Through Sammie’s music, the blaze becomes a purifier, destroying the physical constraints of the sawmill while amplifying the memories it holds.”
Dancing through the flames shows how unifying music is. It’s bigger than hatred, greed, and capitalism. It is bigger than any structure or constraint. Through the blues there was a shared space created for all Black people in the South, as well as the friends and confidants of Black people.Through all forms and eras of Black music there is a throughline that connects all genres, and that is that sound of the soul. In Sinners the decolonization of time allows Black people to move forwards and backwards throughout life without holding the shame of the past and the unease of the future. This decolonization is made possible through music. This concept is popular among black theorists and in an article titled “Temporal (de)colonization and reimagining our relationship with time” by Future Ancestors Services, the authors define temporal decolonization by saying:
“Temporal decolonization seeks to restore and integrate cyclical, relational, and holistic concepts of time into personal and collective practices, allowing individuals and communities to reconnect with ancestral rhythms, sustainable ways of living, and more balanced relationships with the past, present, and future.”
The collapsing of time and space is necessary to the narrative. In an interview with the New Yorker titled, “Ryan Coogler's Road to Sinners” Coogler says that:
“In a lot of ways, Africa explained Mississippi to me. The notorious brutality of slavery and segregation there was not unrelated to the fact that, through the early twentieth century, Mississippi and South Carolina were the only states with majority-Black populations. Anxious slaveholders constructed a rigid hierarchy intended to prevent their numerical superiors from launching large-scale revolts. At the same time, the sheer size of the state’s Black population made it easier for those who were enslaved and for subsequent generations to hold on to African traditions that might have perished under other circumstances. Their misery and their vitality sprang from the same source.”
He takes their separate, yet shared misery and vitality and brings them together through music. Afrofuturist concepts like Rhythm Travel, coined by the poet Amiri Baraka in his poem by the same name, which was focused on a Black man who used music to time travel. This afro-fruturist concept in pairing with historical practices like Griot storytelling make Coogler a creator of rhythm travel.
Making of the Scene
“I Lied to You” was written by Raphael Saadiq and composer Ludwig Göransson, who has worked on all of Coogler’s films. In Vulture’s Interview with Raphael Saadiq about Sinners, Raphael Saadiq Had a Spiritual Experience Working on Sinners, Saadiq says that:
“I’ve actually had the song’s concept in my head since I was probably 19 or 20. The lyric “they say the truth hurts, so I lied to you,” that’s younger me lying to a girlfriend. It only makes sense in a blues song.”
Saadiq took influence from his experience growing up in the Baptist church. When Coogler heard it, he asked Saadiq to go back to the studio to work on it. And that’s how the song made its way into Sinners.
When it came to the actual filming of Miles Caton singing during the temporality-bending juke joint scene, it was all done live. Ganpy says that:
“The live nature of the performance was pivotal in maintaining its authenticity. Göransson DJed live on set, Miles Caton performed his vocals live, and the ensemble of artists — from drummers to dancers — relied on this real-time energy to heighten their performance. Göransson’s integration of vintage instruments, like a 1932 slide guitar (which he apparently bought at an LA guitar store after signing this movie), with modern techniques like Dolby Atmos audio mixing further unified the scene’s temporal layers.”
Closing Thoughts
Both times when I watched the scene there were chills all over my body, and when you have such a strong bodily reaction to music it makes you wonder, “What is it about this that is impacting me?” I kept thinking this to myself, and ultimately knew that I had a desire to explore that feeling. I hope that if you felt this way about the scene too, you were able to learn something!
Further Info and Good Reads
https://open.substack.com/pub/treywalk/p/sinners-a-reading-and-resource-list?r=28q7a6&utm_medium=ios
Black Dandyism
https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/superfine-no-indifferent-appearance
https://open.substack.com/pub/marionteniade/p/smoke-stack-and-black-dandyism?r=28q7a6&utm_medium=ios
Fantastic Review
https://open.substack.com/pub/blackgirlwatching/p/sinners-movie-explained?r=28q7a6&utm_medium=ios
Youtube Interviews
https://youtu.be/0mU_2VWpsmQ?si=_tYf2P2O4-HkKLjZ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jONprH45myw
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