‘Sinners’: The blues at the crossroads of music, culture and history

Spoiler alert: What follows reveals important details about the film’s plot.

In director Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending film “Sinners,” a Delta juke joint becomes the stage for a story where music, history and horror collide. Set in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, the film follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack, recently returned from some shady years in Chicago, and their young cousin Sammie, an aspiring blues guitarist whose music carries a mysterious power. As the story unfolds, a celebration of blues culture turns into a supernatural battle when vampires descend on the brothers’ juke joint, drawn by the irresistible force of Sammie’s music.

But beneath the film’s thrills lies a deeper story about the origins and meaning of the blues. Coogler has described the music as central to the film, using the Delta setting to explore how the blues emerged from the harsh realities of Black life in the Jim Crow South. In “Sinners,” the blues functions as an expression of both pain and of joy — born of the experiences of exploited Black cotton pickers and sharecroppers while also flourishing in the lively atmosphere of juke joints, where communities gathered to sing, dance and endure.

To unpack the film’s rich musical and cultural layers, Newsroom spoke with Cheryl Keyes, a professor of ethnomusicology, chair of the UCLA Department of African American Studies and a leading scholar of African American music. Keyes, whose research and performance spans the blues, hip-hop, electronic music and musical traditions across the African diaspora, explains how “Sinners” draws on the history, spirituality and cultural power of the blues to tell a story that reaches far beyond the screen.

In the conversation below, Keyes explores how the film portrays the roots of the blues, the tension between gospel and secular music, the spiritual dimensions of Black musical traditions and the enduring resilience of Black culture in the face of forces that seek to consume it.

---

More on “Sinners,” film at UCLA and the 2026 Academy Awards:

► Blending Black horror and history: UCLA’s Tananarive Due on “Sinners”

► Oscar-nominated costume designers join UCLA’s ‘Sketch to Screen’ panel April 14 | Livestream

► Once Upon a Time … in Westwood: UCLA and the big screen

---

 

Ryan Coogler has said that the blues are “the entry point” to “Sinners.” What role does music play in the film?

What is significant about “Sinners” is its location of the blues in the delta part of Mississippi — often dubbed “the land where the Blues began” — during the Jim Crow era.

In the film, director Ryan Coogler provides his audience with contexts and circumstances for understanding the philosophy, metaphysics and meaning of the blues. He presents scenes of Black prisoner chain gangs, cotton pickers and sharecroppers working for white plantation owners — a throwback to the days of enslavement. Black workers, he shows, were compensated with “plantation coins,” with little to no monetary value beyond use at the white-owned plantation store. Illiterate of economics, Black sharecroppers were beholden to these store owners’ imposed debt which, by design, contributed to a perpetual peonage system. In this context, the audience sees the role of the blues as a lament.

At the same time, in the film’s juke joint scenes, Coogler shows the blues as entertainment, where the music is performed, danced to and consumed by Black locals and others.

Can you tell us a little bit about how the blues evolved and how the art form is portrayed in “Sinners”?

Although the blues emerged roughly during the end of Reconstruction, its exact origins are rather difficult to trace. However, the antecedents of the blues — folk spirituals, field hollers and work songs — emerged during the period of enslavement. These musical antecedents provided the template out of which the blues developed, with a distinct sound associated with a lamented sensibility that conveys one’s personal reflection and commentary about Black life in the Jim Crow South.

The typical instrumentation of the Delta’s “downhome” blues is embodied by the film’s aspiring young bluesman, Sammie, who accompanies himself on acoustic guitar. There is a call–response relationship between Sammie — the voice — and his instrument in which he delivers short poetic lyrics in a quasi-song manner, embellished by moans and groans.

And Delta Slim, an older bluesman in the film who plays harmonica and piano, recalls the lynching and castration of a musician-friend falsely accused of stealing money from a white man and raping his wife. Slim’s feelings of grief, anger and hopelessness are all intertwined with a grunted moan that clearly shows the powerlessness of a human being who comes to grips with a reality that it is not what one wants life to be but the way it truly is for Black folks down South.

Importantly, the film also harkens back to the early 1900s, a period known as the Great Migration, when African Americans began their exodus from the Jim Crow South to Northern cities in search of a better life free of racial oppression. Cities like Chicago represented to many Black Mississippians a land of “milk and honey,” where they saw better opportunities working in the meat-packing industry than in the cotton fields, with the hope of eventually living “high on the hog.” Among those Southern Black migrants were blues musicians like Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, who brought the “downhome” Delta blues into urban centers, resulting in urban blues.

“Sinners” seems to set up a duality between the blues and gospel music. But at times they seem to represent two sides of one spiritual coin — one secular, the other sacred. Can you talk about that?

In the opening scene, a children’s chorus sings the gospel hymn “This Little Light of Mine” as Sammie, also known as “Preacher Boy,” staggers into his father’s church bloodied and holding what remains of his broken guitar after surviving an encounter with white vampires who invaded the juke joint where he was performing. His father seizes this moment to urge his son to give up the blues — “the devil’s music” — with a bible verse: “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful and he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear, but he will provide a way of escape.”

The polarities of the blues as evil and gospel music as good are primary themes that uphold cultural beliefs by the Black community in the film. These dualisms are further complicated in “Sinners,” especially in scenes from the juke joint, which are more subtle and nuanced.

And with the blues and gospel having emerged from the same antecedents, it is not farfetched to see why theology scholar James Cone posits that the blues are secular spirituals. And Thomas Dorsey, the “Father of Gospel Music,” reminds us of the overall influence of blues on gospel music, hence “gospel blues.”

---

More on Cheryl Keyes’ research and music:

► Cheryl Keyes hits the right notes with Smithsonian anthology of rap music

► Ethnomusicologist Cheryl Keyes releases electronic dance music album

► Cheryl Keyes recognized with global music award for ‘Sundiata Keita Overture’

► Cheryl Keyes: Honoring Juneteenth with art, education and community

---

 

That blues-gospel tension brings up another important aspect of the film: spirituality and magic. What role do these elements play in “Sinners” and how is blues a part of that?

Early in the film, we’re introduced to Annie, Smoke’s wife, who holds a protective presence via her spiritual power through hoodoo, an African-derived medicinal practice. Later, viewers notice Smoke wearing an amulet, or gris-gris, that Annie made for his protection.

And significantly, it’s Annie’s lines that start the film: “There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future … This gift can bring healing to their communities. But it also attracts evil.” This prophetic utterance prepares the audience for something dangerous to come.

Delta Slim, speaking about the blues, echoes Annie’s when he tells Sammie, “It’s magic what we do — it’s sacred and it’s big.”

It becomes clear that Sammie has the gift, through his blues, to summon up the spiritual ancestors of his people’s musical culture. In the juke joint scene during Sammie’s performance, the audience is introduced to layers of origins and a continuum of U.S. Black cultural production out of which West African praise singers, known as griots and jeliw, and instrumental prototypes appear alongside their manifestations in the New World, such as blues, jazz, funk, R&B and rock, moving into the present via hip hop — turntablism, breakdancing, etc.— a sonic remix of the past with the present. And Sammie’s blues performance simply turns up the volume so much that the juke joint’s roof eventually ignites, likened to Parliament’s “Tear the Roof off the Sucker.”

Central to Sinners is the idea that mastery is a source of both accomplishment and jeopardy for Black artists. In essence, a battle for the soul of Black music, culture and identity is also a battle for Black lives. How does this play out in the film?

Delta Slim reminds us in the film that “White folks like the blues … They just don’t like the folks that make it.” At the juke joint, audiences see the Black townspeople who occupy this space, along with other ethnic groups, including a Chinese American couple. But lurking just outside are white vampires with a desire to join the fun — and devour their next victims by sucking the blood out of human life.

In the hopes of being invited in, Remmick, the white vampire leader, and a Ku Klux Klan couple he has turned into vampires, perform a country song, “Pick Your Robin Clean,” ironically written by two African American women. Despite the performance — with Remmick playing the banjo, an African instrument integrated into bluegrass and country music — they are told to seek another venue among the white barrelhouses.

Interestingly, Remmick, who is of Irish descent, intimates a deeper connection to Black culture via Irish people’s long position as an oppressed underclass to the British. The Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s and ’50s drove many Irish to America, where they were at first marginalized and worked alongside Blacks building railroads. Over time, they assimilated into the larger white culture, and some built successful careers as purveyors of racist stereotypes of African American music and culture, such as Blackface minstrelsy — popularized by Thomas “Daddy” Rice, a New York–born performer of Irish descent dubbed “the Father of American Minstrelsy.”

After Remmick and his vampires attack the juke joint revelers, his vampire converts, both Black and white, inherit the art of the Irish high-kicking two-step dance, which they perform to the tune “The Rocky Road to Dublin” — signaling both an assimilation and the domination of white culture. Remmick represents a trope of cultural erasure, along with his new consort of vampires who fetishize and want to consume Black souls, bodies and culture, in much the same way author bell hooks asserts in her 1992 book “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.”

Significantly, Black music and culture withstand the onslaught.

At the end, “Sinners” fast-forwards 60 years to 1992. Sammie, who survived the vampire attack and is now an old man — portrayed by blues legend Buddy Guy in a cameo — sits at the bar of his own blues club as his cousin Stack and Stack’s girlfriend Mary, both vampires, enter.

Stack makes one last request, inviting Sammie to taste the world of vampiric immortality. But Sammie declines and plays the blues song “Travelin’,” which he first performed for Stack in 1932. Then, during the films ending credits, the audience sees a performance by Buddy Guy and contemporary Clarksdale, Mississippi, blues artist Christone “Kingfish” Ingram. Not only has the sheer power of the blues survived the onslaught, the blues has tremendously influenced American music and has made a global impact. The blues is everywhere from the whining sounds of the bottleneck guitar transformed as the steel or dobro guitar — a main staple of country music — and its influence on a bevy of non-Black artists from the likes of Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin, Jimmy Paige and Keith Richards to Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Paul Butterfield, just to name a few.