The “greatest blues icon on the planet”, according to Morgan Freeman
As someone born and raised in Mississippi who gained many of their formative childhood memories in the early 1940s, it was inevitable that Morgan Freeman would forge a lifelong connection with the blues.
Some of the actor’s earliest memories are tied to his mother, a piano player, and spending his evenings surrounded by guitar players, moonshine, and music. Not that he was aware they were even playing the blues, though, since he was too young to understand what it was, not that he didn’t enjoy hearing it.
“I didn’t call it the blues,” he recalled. “I didn’t know just what they were doing. But it goes that far back for me.” Despite being oblivious to its nature, he was hooked, although it wouldn’t be until years later that the Academy Award winner gained a deeper understanding of its origins, history, and importance.
These days, he’s something of an expert. He probably wouldn’t consider himself as such, but since he lent his name to Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience, a live performance that melds Mississippi Delta blues with orchestral compositions and a narration from the man himself, he’s clearly got skin in the game.
That, and the fact that he co-owns the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, which took its name from the city being known as the city where it really began to take hold. He might try and downplay his knowledge or authority on the subject, but it’s impossible to deny that Freeman holds the blues closer to his heart than any other form of music.
As far as he’s concerned, though, despite wave after wave of pioneering, legendary, and influential musicians emerging from the blues circuit, dating from the tail-end of the 19th century to the modern day, Freeman only views one of them as the be-all and end-all, and he’s got a point.
Even if you don’t agree that he’s the pinnacle of the art form, nobody can even try and state a half-decent case that BB King doesn’t deserve to be on the Mount Rushmore of the genre. They called him the ‘King of the Blues’ for reasons that go well beyond his last name, and when he passed away in 2015 at the age of 1989, the Shawshank star was quick to pay tribute.
“Needless to say, BB was the greatest blues icon on the planet,” Freeman told Time. “He kept us rocking and rolling throughout a 70-year career.”
He didn’t just restrict the iconic bluesman to planet Earth, though, adding that “his passing has created a hole in the universe.”
Several years before his death, the feature-length documentary BB King: The Life of Riley was released. Who was drafted in to appear as a talking head and lend their unmistakably sonorous tones to the project as a narrator? Voiceover artist extraordinary Morgan Freeman, of course.
