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In Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, the Smokestack twins – a gangster pair played by Michael B Jordan – return to their Mississippi Delta hometown to open a juke joint and make a fast buck, only to wind up hunkered inside when danger literally comes knocking. But the juke joint is more than a safe space from vampires; for Black people during segregation, it was an escape from the horrors of the so-called “separate-but-equal” US economy. “The juke joint represents, as the film suggests, this multifaceted connection to the foundation of Black experience,” says William Ferris, a University of North Carolina history professor who has made documenting blues music and southern culture his life’s work. “It’s a safe haven from racial violence.”
During the late 19th and early 20th century the juke joint was a southern social institution, the place to drink and unwind over live music. The vast majority of them were owned and operated by Black people. In fact the word juke (also spelled jook) is said to derive from Gullah, a creole language that has been spoken by Black people on the southeastern coast for generations; it means to dance, act disorderly or engage in rowdy behavior – fun that juke joints were known for.
They were on the same social continuum with the Black church, the south’s other cornerstone institution. The juke joint was for Saturday night, the church for Sunday morning. And the major difference between juke joints and roadhouses (aka the white spaces for honky tonk and country music) was the door policy: everyone was welcome.
Throughout its 137-minute runtime, Sinners plays with the cognitive dissonance in the symbiosis between the church and the juke joint – starting with the twins’ guitar hero cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) breaking away from his preacher father to play the blues at their new juke.
“It’s a nice journey in history,” says Kristen Warner, a Cornell University media studies professor. “You get to see Black folks be Black folks in this small town, and they all have these stories that are ellipses, that you can just pick back up on.”
Sinners isn’t the juke joint’s first studio motion picture close-up. It’s also a significant setting in The Color Purple, which Ferris consulted on. “I took [film producer] Quincy Jones to a juke,” Ferris recalls. “He brought his whole design crew down to Oxford [Mississippi] to look at my archives on blues and film. They used some of my film in the juke joint scenes.” The 2006 period drama Idlewild, which stars the rappers André 3000 and Big Boi of OutKast, spotlights a Georgia juke joint during the Great Depression.
Juke joints once stippled the landscape of the deep south, a welcome port of call on the outskirts of town to those who may be traveling with the Green Book as a guide. “It was a guide to those places that were safe havens to spend the night, to eat and listen to music,” Ferris explains. “You could be risking your life if you went into a place that was not Black-owned and you were Black.”
Highway 61, which cuts north-south through Mississippi, traces the line of juke joints that run Memphis to New Orleans. It’s also the path many Black southerners followed to escape during the Great Migration. (Bob Dylan’s sixth studio album, Highway 61 Revisited, nods at those parallel histories.) Some jukes were glorified house parties that were held in a back room. Another might take up a small shack. Still more were set up on former plantations, which allowed land owners to claw back their remittances to sharecroppers.
Often, sharecroppers were paid in paper or wooden tokens called scrip – which were only valid at the landowners’ own high-priced, Blacks-only stores. “So they were making money multiple ways on the plantation,” Ferris says.
Even so, juke joints were one of the few business opportunities that Black people under segregation could legitimately get into. Like the Smokestack twins, juke joint proprietors were huge personalities. “In my hometown of Vicksburg [Mississippi], there was a place called the Blue Room run by a man named Tom Vince, a flamboyant figure,” Ferris recalls.
“He dressed in designer clothes and had a special pocket on the back designed to hold his pistol. Even in death, he had a very fancy tomb.” Black spirit makers could get paid making corn liquor at juke joints. Black chefs could make money there serving chitlins, a delicacy made from the cheapest available – pig entrails. Fried fish, which the twins serve at their juke, would’ve been as rare a delicacy as Irish beer in the middle of the Mississippi Delta – where freshwater access was limited.
And of course musicians made hey, too. In many ways, the juke joint was a cornerstone of the music business, the backbone of the chitlin circuit – the Blacks-only entertainment junket named after the signature juke joint dish. Juke joint blues became shorthand for a raw, energetic music style and lyrics that addressed love and hardship, and a performance style that leaned into grittiness. And juke joints were the best place to dance to it or really drink it in.
They attracted jazz and R&B talents, but were best known for stamping blues superstars such as Howlin’ Wolf, whose 1956 hit Smokestack Lightning almost certainly inspired the names of Sinners’ twin protagonists; and Bobby Rush, whose music is featured on the Sinners soundtrack.
Buddy Guy, who makes a cameo in Sinners, said he mastered the guitar while starting out his career playing juke joints in Louisiana; he was inspired by Guitar Slim, a juke joint hero who is somewhat represented in a Sinners character played by Delroy Lindo. Juke joints not only provided an artist with the rapt audiences they needed to make a living (it wasn’t uncommon for performers to rack up hundreds of gigs up and down Highway 61), the venues were also how artists made a name for themselves that they could then use to break into a broader career recording music and perform for white audiences.
But of course a juke joint reputation only went so far in the segregation era. Major Black performers were subject to separate-but-equal laws no matter how big their name. “I thought when I went to Chicago, I would be free to go where I wanted to, stay where I want to, speak when I want to, sleep where I want to,” Rush said while recalling an early performance in a suburb called Robbins – a leading Great Migration settlement.
“I got a job there playing for a white club that I thought was a big club compared to Arkansas juke joints, but I had to play behind a curtain in the back where they wanted to hear my music but didn’t want to see my face. At that time, I didn’t understand it. What’s disturbing about the whole thing is that out of all things that have changed some things remain the same.”
The tragic irony is that the fall of Jim Crow has brought down the juke joint with it. The few that are still standing haven’t hosted a party in decades. In 2008, BB King bought a historic juke joint in his Mississippi hometown called Club Ebony where Ray Charles, Tina Turner and others cut their teeth. The juke fell further into disrepair after King’s death in 2015, but it has since been revived by a fundraising effort that included a grant from the regional, National Endowment for the Arts-affiliated organization South Arts.
WC Handy, a prolific composer who styled himself as the Father of the Blues (like Sammie’s father, Handy’s father thought musical instruments were Satan’s tools), was among the first to publish annotated blues compositions. Alice Walker, author of the novel the Color Purple, wrote volumes of blues poetry – which, like the lyrics, explore themes of struggle, despair and sex.
But the preservation effort only goes so far as popular tastes have moved on from Delta blues. Sinners, though, doesn’t just revitalize this history – it venerates it.
“It’s a very powerful film and a game changer,” Ferris says. “It’s beautifully put together and highly effective.”
