This story contains extensive spoilers for Sinners. Ryan Coogler’s vampire-blues epic Sinners centers on an eventful 24 hours in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, as gangster twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) host the opening night of their juke joint. The horror film's lore—borrowed from folktales across ancient cultures—suggests that some musicians are imbued with the power to blur the line between life and death, like Miles Canton’s character, the twins’s cousin Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore. With one powerful blues performance at the club, he summons the spirits of Black music past and present.
Sammie’s performance is a summation of Sinners’ love letter to Black music and its influence on every modern genre, paired with the film’s overall adulation of Black Southern history and culture. However, the most compelling moment that shows the true emotional power of Sammie’s music, and all great music, doesn’t take place at the juke. The most poignant music scene (and my favorite of the film) is when another Sinners character demonstrates music’s universal power to connect the past and present.
