Just a few weeks until we see if Sinners takes any Oscars, and NPR wants to remind you its music and the people singing it are pretty great.
On Friday, the nonprofit organization released a new Tiny Desk concert featuring two of the film’s stars, Miles Caton and Buddy Guy, making their Tiny Desk debuts. Both play the respective young and older versions of the SmokeStack twins’ cousin Sammie Moore, and because they’re both really talented, they teamed on the movie’s two big Sammie-centric songs, “Travelin'” and the Oscar-nominated “I Lied to You.”
Before Caton comes on, the Guy gets the first half of the concert to himself, where he and his band play two songs from his own blues history—that’d be 1991’s “Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues” and his rendition of Willie Dixon’s 1954 blues standard “Hoochie Coochie Man.” The man can sing and play, and he’s got a fun energy, whether he’s accidentally cursing on camera and trying to correct it or making some horny jokes while Caton tries to do his thing. (The movie’s horny, so he’s just keeping the energy!) Fittingly, they play off each other very well as two guys just chatting it up, and when it’s time for them to play together? Yeah, man, that’s the stuff.
Listening to the two men together, it’s no wonder why Sinners’ music is up for the Oscars, or why Guy himself won “Best Traditional Blues Album” at the 2026 Grammys for his latest album, Ain’t Done With the Blues. And along with capping off Black History Month, the concert loops back to the film’s idea of music reverberating across time and different generations of artists. Hopefully they get to duet outside the film’s orbit—or at least stick with music as long as possible.
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