Ryan Coogler's new high-budget move Sinners puts 1930s blues and horror on a wild collision course, and its soundtrack, which features Buddy Guy, Christone "Kingfish" Ingram and Alice In Chains' Jerry Cantrell, has been masterminded to be as historically accurate as possible.
Set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, the film stars Michael B. Jordan who plays twin brothers who, upon returning to their hometown, cross paths with a supernatural evil. The score plays a pivotal role in its storytelling and treats the history of the genre with the utmost respect.
Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson (The Mandalorian, Tenet, Oppenheimer) was sent Robert Johnson and Tommy Johnson recordings for references and ultimately wound up recording much of the soundtrack on three 1932 Dobro Cyclops resonator guitars, which Jordan's protagonist also plays onscreen. Getting hold of those nearly 100-year-old instruments, however, proved exhaustive.
“I was able to find three of them in the world,” he tells Classic FM. “One in London, one in Nashville, and one in L.A. Playing it with a slide, you use the guitar almost like a voice. It creates this beautiful note and gives you a lot of variety on how you can play.”
Göransson also worked closely with blues producer Lawrence "Boo" Mitchell, whose Royal Studios in Tennesssee became the base of operations. Mitchell introduced the Swede to a cluster of the other musicians who would stamp their mark on the soundtrack, including Guy and Ingram, to help bring what, for Göransson is a project that means a huge deal.
“My dad is a guitar teacher, so when I was about six or seven years old he started giving me lessons. Then when I was eight or nine I heard [Metallica’s] 'Enter Sandman' for the first time and that's when I got really passionate about music,” he explains.
“It was kind of my own thing. My dad was into the blues and I was into heavy metal, [even though] at that age I didn't even understand that like all music, even heavy metal, comes from the blues.
“It's something that I think came out in this score, and it's a very personal score,” the Swedish composer continues. “It starts mostly acoustically. I wrote almost the entire score on [the 1932 Dobro], and then, as the story develops, it transitions into heavy metal, orchestra, strings and big drums. So the guitar tones transitioned from acoustic to electric.”
One key scene in the film — minor spoiler alert — which took several months to film showcases the then-and-now of the blues. It shows how the stylings of Robert Johnson and company originated in Africa and morphed, over time, into funk, and far beyond. It’s a scene, he says, that unfolds “in a surreal kind of dreamy state,” and provides a powerful history lesson for those unaware of how much of a cornerstone the blues was for genres that followed it.
Like Göransson, Coogler had found himself drawing lines between his musical loves and those of the generation before him, which inspired him to write the film. Across its 138-minute playtime, it explores the appropriation of Black music and culture via colonialism.
Alice in Chains were, strangely, a key driver in his wanting to explore that theme.
“I started listening to it, bro, and I was like, ‘This shit is like what my uncle used to play’: the blues,” he told The Breakfast Club [via Metal Hammer]. “I’m listening to the guitar riffs and what they’re talking about and the passion they’re singing with, and I’m like, ‘That’s odd.’ I dug into the research, man, and that’s exactly what it is: it’s just blues music sung by white people.”
As a result, Cantrell features on “In Moonlight” alongside Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich. His contribution saw him taking a portion of the score and “writing a song out of it” with the haunting track a collaborative effort.
Speaking of his involvement in the film, Buddy Guy — who features on "Travelin'" and plays Sammie Moore — has said he used the opportunity to fulfill the wishes of Muddy Waters and B.B. King that he helps “keep the blues alive”.
Sinners was made with a lavish budget of around $90 million, meaning the Dobros were likely a drop in the ocean of the film’s expenditure. The movie has already amassed nearly $300 million at the box office.
