I Tried to Find the Juke Joint From ‘Sinners,’ and I Don’t Recommend It

I don’t know what I was thinking, exactly.

All I know is that I was in New Orleans, I’d heard Sinners was filmed nearby, and I had a day to spare. The internet told me the film’s juke joint scenes took place on an abandoned golf course 20 miles east in the tiny town of Braithwaite, and I was pretty sure I’d found it on Google Maps.

If you’re like me, you loved Sinners. You might even be going to see it again for its Halloween re-release in theaters. And if you’re like me, you also make a habit of visiting filming locations for your favorite movies. So I rented a car, drove to Braithwaite, and parked. “This’ll be fun,” I thought.

Instead, two hours of sweating and panting later, I considered myself like Sammie Moore at the end of Sinners: lucky to make it out alive.

If you want to visit Sinners filming locations near New Orleans, you can see the Chinese grocery stores where Grace and Bo work, or the fields where Cornbread and his wife toil as sharecroppers. You can even stop by the train station where Delta Slim busks during the day, and where Mary reminds Stack just where he once stuck his tongue.

But take it from me. No matter how mesmerized you were by Sinners, and the hands-down greatest musical sequence in any of our lifetimes, don’t try to find the juke joint.

I

started at the northern edge of the overgrown golf course. I’d found a clearing on the map that looked like it could have once hosted a building, and in a good sign, it was next to a lake. To get there, I trudged right into a wall of thick, 8-foot-tall reeds. I ducked and dodged my way for about 20 feet, stepping over rusted beer cans while being startled by jackrabbits.

At one point I turned around, and realized I had lost all orientation. I also felt a strange stinging pain. I looked downward. It was 90 degrees in September, I was in shorts, and giant bugs were all over my bare legs, biting away.

Rushing out from the dense jungleland toward what the map indicated was a road but was actually a slough of mud and foliage, I made my way west. A rectangular building at a nearby farm, a warehouse maybe, stood near another lake. Maybe that was it.

It was not.

This is where I tell you that I’m from the Bay Area, not Louisiana. Have you ever been to the South? Have you ever had loud, noisy insects buzzing in the trees all around you? Like, one million zillion insects of unusual size, nattering away in a constant thrum of menace, of taunting, of BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ?

Amplify that sound by 20 decibels, add humid air and muddy shoes, subtract 3 quarts of equilibrium, and that’s pretty much where I was at. It had only been 15 minutes.

Here’s the thing: I knew pretty definitively that the juke joint was only built for the movie, and was now torn down. I didn’t care. I just wanted to find any remnant of its existence. Even an outline on the ground, or the clearing where it once stood.

So I turned back, but with a Plan B: a long road that led from my starting point southward. It appeared to lead to two or three more clearings, and another lake.

When I approached the road I noticed an encouraging sight: the gravel of the road seemed recent, and new unweathered black tarpaper stuck out from beneath it. Was this road installed just for the film crew? I had to believe so, as I marched with new confidence toward my destination, about a mile away.

Here is what you’ll find on this road: more jackrabbits than you have ever imagined in your life. Giant crickets the length of your hand. Dozens of other insects that land on your arms and legs, feast a while, then bounce. Swampy water nearby that may or may not contain hungry alligators.

And about that road? It is not easily traversable. Those 10-foot reeds grow massively on each side until they fall over and topple across the path. As I climbed over and under giant plants for a mile in the damp heat, my mind started to go numb at the slow, exhausting pace.

When I got to the end, I realized that what I saw on Google Maps must have been at least a year old. The clearings I’d seen were now almost entirely overgrown with tall greenery. Could one of them have been where the invading white musicians sing an ancient Scottish folk song? I let out a resigned sigh and admitted to myself that I couldn’t be 100% sure.

The lake, though. Even though it was covered in algae, its contours looked immediately familiar. By this time in my quest, the sun had started to hang low in the sky, and if I squinted my eyes a little, I could imagine the sun taking its harrowing toll on Remmick and the others in the lake.

But that was about it. I headed back, accepting my loss. Never before had I trekked so far to a movie filming location and discovered so little.

A

fter a half mile of bobbing and weaving through the reeds all over the road, I took a break beneath a clearing of huge oak trees. On the ground was a scrap piece of 2-by-4 with a plot of numbers painted on it. A map of film trailers, maybe? A camera layout for a complex scene?

Whatever it was, it had some gaffer’s tape on the back, which meant it was definitely from a film set and not a leftover artifact from the golf course. Excited and delirious at finding any trace of Sinners here in the middle of nowhere, I carried it back as my only memento.

When I returned to civilization, I spotted a neighbor out walking with his daughters. As he and I talked about the movie, he confirmed in a thick Louisiana accent that awh yueah, they filmed it awl rite down the en’ of that road there. So it was true: I had been in the exact correct spot. There was just nothing there anymore to see. The Louisiana marsh has swallowed it all up.

Later that night, I thought about why I’d expected anything more, as I drove 85 miles to Donaldsonville, which stands in for downtown Clarksdale in Sinners.

During dinner at a cafe along the film’s Railroad Avenue, my waitress told me all about the movie crew’s kindness. A guitarist in the corner sang Johnny Gill’s “My, My, My.” Outside, the air was quiet and still as I took one last look at the empty grocery stores from the film, and pulled away into the night.

It was perfect. If you’re planning a Sinners pilgrimage, go there. And take my advice: stay away from the juke joint.