The 1954 album Morgan Freeman considers the greatest of all time: “Such a great story”
As someone who was born and raised in Memphis in the late 1930s and 1940s, it should go without saying that Morgan Freeman has a soft spot for the blues. And yet, the genre isn’t responsible for the album he considers the greatest he’s ever heard.
While you might think it’s an easy association to make, since Freeman’s hometown has literally been dubbed the ‘Home of the Blues’ by no less of an authority than the United States Congress, and it’s by no means a given that the veteran actor is a lifelong devotee of the art form, he’s made it very clear that he is.
For one thing, he’s the co-owner of Clarksdale, Mississippi’s Ground Zero Blues Club, with the joint taking its name from the city being hailed as the origin point for the Delta blues, and more recently, the Morgan Freeman Symphonic Blues Experience has been touring America, so his fandom is pretty self-evident.
That doesn’t mean his personal tastes are narrow-minded, not by any stretch. Like a lot of other people, he might consider BB King the “greatest blues icon of all time,” which is hard to argue with, but his obsession with Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rogue! shows that he’s not against the odd showstopper or two, with soul icon Al Green one of his favourite vocalists.
Much the same as countless other men of his generation, he’s also got a soft spot for Frank Sinatra, with the Academy Award-winning actor revealing that one of his go-to LPs that he can listen to at any time is ‘Ol Blue Eyes’ crooning out his greatest hits. If you want to split hairs, a greatest hits album doesn’t really count when you think about your favourite albums, which leaves only one record in the mix.
When asked that very question during a Reddit AMA, there was only one title that came to Freeman’s mind, with the industry’s most famous deliverer of sage advice and plot-advancing exposition pointing to 1954’s Something Cool, the debut solo album from cool jazz extraordinaire, June Christy.
Starting out with The Stan Kenton Orchestra in the mid-1940s, Christy earned her stripes as part of a collective before going solo, and Something Cool was heralded as something of a pivotal moment for the cool jazz vocal style, with Christy playing a prominent role in ushering it into the mainstream.
“Something Cool is such a great story, it really is,” Freeman explained in 2012. “It’s a narrative.” That was when he selected the opener and title track as the first of his three must-listen songs, and sticking rigidly to type, the second was Sinatra’s ‘Come Fly with Me’.
As for the third? That would be LaBelle’s original 1975 version of ‘Lady Marmalade’, which was, of course, covered by Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lil’ Kim, and Mya for the star’s beloved Moulin Rouge! He might be a blues man, first and foremost, but clearly, Freeman is a musical man for all seasons.
