Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2025) had barely begun when a portentous voiceover by the character Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) made me reach for a dictionary:
“There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death.... In West Africa, they’re called griots.”
Merriam-Webster gives just
one pronunciation of
griot, a word borrowed from French: /ˈgrē-ˌō/, the only pronunciation I’ve known. In the movie it’s /ˈgrē-ˌot/. The
Oxford English Dictionary gives
five pronunciations, one of which, from West African English, has a sounded
t : /ˈɡriɔt/. Perhaps the filmmakers were striving for an authentically African pronunciation, though I’d call the pronunciation in the movie markedly different from the one in the
OED sound file, and emphatically American (Wunmi Mosaku, born in Nigeria, grew up in Manchester, England). From what I’ve read on the Internets, the sounded
t has struck many viewers as a puzzling mistake. It certainly puzzled me.
At the thirteen-minute mark, we see a street in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and the non-diegetic music playing is the Willie Dixon song “Wang Dang Doodle,” first recorded by Howlin’ Wolf in 1960, and here performed by an electric blues band. The subtitles say “Groovy music playing.” It’s 1932 in Clarksdale.
At the twenty-one minute mark, a Dobro is said to be “Charley Patton’s guitar,” won in a card game by a character in the movie. Gosh, no. According to a contemporary witness, Patton played
“a black Stella with a white neck.” Here’s
a luthier’s page with more about Patton and Stellas. I’ve been listening to pre-war blues music since I was a teenager, and I can say with certainty that I’ve never heard a Dobro (or National) resonator guitar on a Patton record. And I’ve never read anything suggesting that Patton ever played a resonator guitar.
Charley (or Charlie) Patton was the founder of the Delta blues, as Yazoo Records once called him, the first star of the music. In other words, he’s no non-entity. Pairing Patton with a Dobro might be analogous to pairing Jimi Hendrix with, say,
a Gretsch Country Gentleman. For anyone who knows anything about one or the other guitarist, the pairing is merely ludicrous. I can only assume that the filmmakers, having found
a strange-looking guitar from 1932, decided to make a Patton connection — and make it for an audience that knows little or nothing about Mississippi music. In which case, they could have made up a name for an imaginary musician.
I’m not evaluating the movie here. I’m reporting only that it lost me. I fast-forwarded through most of the remaining two hours, though I did slow down long enough to appreciate the scene in which musicians and dancers, ancient to the future, inhabit the shared space of a juke joint.
*
Later that day: The matter of that guitar is more complicated than I thought. (See the comments.) All I’ll say here is that any character in
Sinners who believes that guitar belonged to Charley Patton is one gullible character.
[“Ancient to the future”: not a phrase from the movie. It’s from a motto associated with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future.]
