Screen veteran Morgan Freeman tells ITV Arts Editor Nina Nannar how he fears the history of blues music is being overlooked and shares his hopes of winning a Grammy in the genre with his debut album
Credits: Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros Pictures, Chess Records, Decca Records
It has inspired the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and has given birth to multiple other music genres like R&B, and rap.
But now one of cinema’s most famous actors is urging us to remember where the blues came from and the people who created it.
Morgan Freeman has been in the business of bigging up the blues for many years.
It started with him opening Ground Zero in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a blues club dedicated to giving a platform to a music genre that originated from slaves and their descendants, their response to being forced to work in degrading conditions, picking cotton and working the land in America’s Deep South.
He fears the history of the music, which he calls America’s Music, is being overlooked, with music by the likes of 1930s blues legend Robert Johnson being consigned to the past, and with it, acknowledgement of a period of sorrow and lament suffered by Black people.
He followed up the first club with a second in Biloxi, also in Mississippi, and now the Oscar-winning actor has turned his hand to music producing, coming up with the Morgan Freeman Symphonic Blues Experience, an album charting the blues songs that began a century ago.
The album features legendary blues artists like Taj Mahal, accompanied by the British orchestra Chineke!, who recorded their part in Abbey Road Studios in the UK.
He toured the music around a few cities first, and now it is being released.
I met him in Gulf Shores, a city in Alabama. He is a child of the Deep South and grew up listening to the blues.
It is a music of lament, he tells me, born of the “hollers” between the workers in the fields. I ask him to sing me an example of a blues song from that time, and he obliges.
It tells a tale of hardship, and he wants the emotions and the memories that inspired those songs to be shared with a new generation today.
He agrees that it might be a shameful period in US history that some are keen not to dwell on. But he is adamant it is returning.
The music on his album is lifted by the use of an orchestra, and the actor himself narrates its opening.
From Alabama we make our way to Jackson, Mississippi where another club, Beatty Street Blues, has just opened.
They are still a rarity here, but on the stage tonight we find Lady Adrena and Keith Johnson. Both artists are on Freeman’s album.
For Lady Adrena singing the blues is a way for her to express her emotions, she says and carry the torch for a new generation of artists.
Keith Johnson is the great-nephew of the late blues legend Muddy Waters. For him, it’s about keeping the music alive by visiting schools to share the history of the blues, and therefore the roots of many of the students he sees.
He says this is an era where black people are not going to be ignored and that starts with their music.
Last year’s hit film Sinners, set in a juke joint, helped celebrate the blues sound on a global platform, and he points to a rising number of African American musicians who are now playing traditional blues, albeit dedicated clubs are hard to find.
Authentic blues music does not get extensive commercial radio airplay, Johnson would like young people today to give credit to the source of so much of what they listen to today.
He is grateful for all Freeman is doing for artists like him.
Meanwhile, Freeman is warning against AI being used to convince people that they are listening to him, and that famous baritone voice, when it’s actually fake.
He has had to take legal action, he says, against what he says is stealing, though it is difficult to source the fakery at times.
At least the voice that opens his album is undoubtedly the real deal.
Next stop? He would very much like to win Album of the Year, the top award at the Grammys next year.
That would mark a huge first for the genre. And make an 89-year-old screen veteran very happy.
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