‘Sinners: Sounds That Summon’ Opens at CAAM, a Museum Show Built Around Sammie’s Guitar

The guitar that sets Club Juke on fire is now a museum piece, and the show built around it is about the music, not the movie. The California African American Museum in Los Angeles opened Sinners: Sounds That Summon on Tuesday (Oct. 20), and it runs through March 14, 2027, Variety reports. Variety calls it the first museum exhibition devoted to a film’s music.

Warner Bros. Archives co-organized it with the museum, and the independent curator Imani Y. Haynes curated, per CAAM. The centerpiece is the guitar Miles Caton plays as Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore, shown beside the costumes of Smoke and Stack, the twin brothers both played by Michael B. Jordan, and the Club Juke sign, evoking, Variety writes, “the feeling of stepping into the juke joint itself.”

Sound has the power to form creative worlds that manifest joy, protection, belonging, and freedom.

CAAM exhibition description, California African American Museum

That is the thesis. The show revisits the Club Juke sequence, in which music acts as “a portal through time, from traditional African ritual to present-day street dance,” and sorts it into three themes, Variety reports: Music Makes Sound, which looks at instruments and the traditions they carry; Music Makes Movement, on dance as cultural memory; and Music Makes Worlds, on how music shapes language, fashion, identity and community. It ends with a participatory experience, Sounds That Carry Us, where visitors are asked to reflect on a song, sound or genre that carries them back to joy, hope, freedom or community.

The song that lights the juke joint is “I Lied to You,” written by Raphael Saadiq and the composer Ludwig Göransson. In the film, Sammie sings it when he is introduced to the crowd, and by the last refrain the juke joint’s roof is on fire, Rolling Stone writes. Hear it below.

The music has already had its night in the spotlight. At the Oscars in March, Caton and Saadiq led a recreation of Club Juke with Buddy Guy, Brittany Howard, Bobby Rush, Shaboozey and Misty Copeland, among others, per Rolling Stone, and Sinners took four awards from a record 16 nominations: best actor for Jordan, original screenplay for Coogler, cinematography for Autumn Durald Arkapaw and original score for Göransson, as Variety lists them. Göransson’s win was his third for a score.

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Practical details: CAAM sits in Exposition Park, and a curatorial walkthrough is set for Oct. 27 from 2 to 3 p.m., the museum says.

Göransson’s Oscar speech could double as the exhibition’s wall text. Accepting the award, he said his father put a guitar in his arms when he was 7:

When I was 7, he put a guitar in my arms … it was the guitar that opened up a lot of doors for me … brought me to the States, and led me to one of the great storytellers of our time, Ryan Coogler.

Ludwig Göransson, composer, Billboard