Morgan Freeman on His New Blues Album and His Action-Star Dreams

By Brian Hiatt

Brian Hiatt

Morgan Freeman has spent the last five decades playing Batman’s Bat-Tech supplier, the president of the United States (multiple times), Nelson Mandela, and God himself, but since 2001, he’s also been the proprietor of his very own juke joint. He co-founded Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi — a state where he spent part of his childhood — after realizing that visitors to the site of Robert Johnson‘s crossroads had no place to hear the blues. 

The latest offshoot of that venture is the just-released album Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience, which does just what the title promises, adding tasteful orchestral arrangements by London’s Chineke! Orchestra to new takes on blues standards. Taj Mahal covers Son House’s “Death Letter Blues,” Keb’ Mo’ revs up Albert King’s “Cadillac Assembly Line,” and Shemekia Copeland reclaims Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues,” nodding to Led Zeppelin’s reinvention of it along the way. The album, which also includes historical narration by Freeman, benefits the Ground Zero Arts Foundation, the club’s charitable arm. It grew out of a touring live show of the same name featuring local orchestras alongside Ground Zero regulars, with Freeman’s filmed narration.

The 89-year-old Freeman (resplendent at home in a dashiki) and Ground Zero co-owner and CEO Eric Meier joined Rolling Stone on a Zoom call to talk about Freeman’s own musical history, why he’s jealous of Denzel Washington, his thoughts on retirement, and more.

Morgan, you heard the blues on a porch in Mississippi as a very young child. What do you remember about it? Morgan Freeman: I remember moonshine in a Mason jar. I remember fried fish. I remember going with my grandmother to a pond or a creek somewhere and fishing with a cane pole. Those are snatches, just like this guy with gold teeth on my grandmother’s porch. He’s drinking moonshine out of a Mason jar and he’s got a guitar and he’s, yeah, music-ing. I was three or four years old.

Were you drawn to it at that point, or was it just part of the atmosphere? Freeman: No, not particularly. It was just music. By the time I was five it was Glenn Miller. And “Tuxedo Junction,” “Five O’Clock in the Afternoon.” And a little bit of Count Basie. Not drawn to it, it’s just that was the music in the air. People would have their Philco radios turned up. You’re not old enough to remember that.  And you moved to Chicago in the 1940s, and you missed the Chicago blues — that wasn’t part of your experience growing up. Freeman: Not at all. Yeah. South side of Chicago was a jungle. You had to thread your way through that carefully. Yeah, growing up, hoodlum-ism was one of the easier choices to make. Did you ever have any interest in becoming a musician yourself? Freeman: In high school, I was in music. I sang with the glee club — tenor, then bass because the bass guys couldn’t handle it. And in the band I blew the alto saxophone. But at 16, I suffered pneumonia and pleurisy. Got an abscess on my lung for that, for my pleurisy. And the doctor said, “No more horn. You won’t be able to do it. You won’t be able to get into the Air Force either.” I got into the Air Force and I didn’t have a mark on my lung. So you could’ve kept playing the horn, maybe. Freeman: I could’ve. I heard that Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont wanted you to play a harmonica at the end of that movie — the one that Tim Robbins’ character gave you — and you turned that down, so we didn’t get a chance to see that either. Freeman: Yeah, to me, that was a “Yes, boss man” moment. It didn’t make sense to me.

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That was one of the greatest endings of all time, so whatever decisions you made clearly worked out. Freeman: Yeah. I loved it. I like the whole movie, actually. When did your actual interest in the blues begin, and how did it develop? Freeman: We were in Mississippi working and we saw a couple of young people, and they said, “Where can we hear some blues?” That was it. There was no answer. We didn’t know. There was no place. So you made it. Freeman: We bought the building. Turned it into a juke joint. That was Ground Zero.

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Meier: With this project, there’s a hip-hop band I’d seen perform in Australia called the Hilltop Hoods. They’re these two high school buddies that have a really fun hip-hop thing, and they had done some symphony crossover. I talked to them and said, “OK, I like this kind of idea. Let’s try this for the blues.”… Normally, you do an album and then you go tour. We did the reverse here. We realized we had something and with the response we’ve received, we thought we want to memorialize it with a project like this.

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