Morgan Freeman On The Blues And Life In Mississippi
MORGAN FREEMAN ON THE BLUES AND LIFE IN MISSISSIPPI
Birthplace of the Blues and home of the Delta Blues Museum, Clarksdale has established itself as a mecca for music enthusiasts across the globe. Every year, musicians make the pilgrimage to Clarksdale – to perform, to reflect, and to pay homage to the performers that defined our industry.
Mississippi’s most famous resident, Morgan Freeman, was standing under a mossy oak tree at the height of a Southern afternoon. It was 92F (33C) in the shade. He had played 18 holes of golf, but there wasn’t a bead of sweat on his face. I made up for both of us as we edged towards a silvery wooden bench.
“I grew up here. It’s comfortable for me,” he said. “I was just in New Mexico, in the desert, working. It was hot – but I couldn’t stand it. This is… to me, this is warm.” He smiled. It’s a smile familiar from dozens of movies, from The Shawshank Redemption to The Dark Knight. “People say, 'I’ve never been to Mississippi’. I say, well, you should come.”
The stereotype of the hospitable Southerner may be well-worn, but it’s no less true for that, and he was as welcoming as any I’d met in these parts. But in the wilds of Mississippi, fame strains even Freeman’s kindly nature.
Clarksdale, known as the birthplace of the blues, is back on the map because Freeman lives nearby and part-owns the Ground Zero Blues Club downtown. He preferred to meet at the mansion of Clarksdale’s mayor, and his business partner, Bill Luckett, instead of at the club. A trip there would have caused a small riot, he intimated, without any hint of arrogance.
Freeman, 76, was slouched on a leather sofa, watching golf on a massive television when I arrived. The detritus of a snack lunch was being cleared away as we moved to the glade outside. All cherished moments of normality for a man with an abnormal existence.
“All this at one time was cotton,” he gesticulated into the distance. “People working those cotton fields, they would sing, we call it 'field holler’ . You got two or three hundred people out across the fields answering the call, you know, it’s like call-and-response. It’s a great work song, great work rhythms that they set up. And that was actually the birth of the blues.”
Clarksdale was not a random choice of home for Freeman, who was born up the road in Memphis and raised half an hour from Clarksdale. Leaving Manhattan for Mississippi was just a case of heading back to his roots.
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“I really began to suffer [in New York] from the fact that there just wasn’t enough real earth around. I’m really drawn to this – grass, trees… Not so much asphalt,” he declared, surveying the greenness all around .
This was music to my ears. I’d made a detour to Clarksdale on a cross-country trip across the US by Land Rover using only dirt roads.
For an actor it takes a good degree of confidence to move away from the silver-screen epicentres of Hollywood, New York or London . When Freeman went back to the Mississippi Delta he might as well have relocated to the moon: directors would track him down regardless and, 10 years past retirement age, he is still landing the choicest parts on offer. But we weren’t there to discuss movies . He agreed to meet because I wanted to talk about the blues and find out about life in the delta .
Clarksdale changed in the time Freeman was away in New York. The blues might have been born here but, like the mighty Mississippi river nearby, the music flowed out and on. Even so, a birthplace is a birthplace, and a clamour for Clarksdale music remained, albeit largely unrequited. Enter Freeman.
“When I first moved down here and Bill and I started hanging out together,” he told me, “we would see people in Clarksdale, you know, with backpacks and sandals, shorts and black socks – tourists. And the universal question generally was: where can we hear some blues?
“There was another little place here called the Crossroads – they would have blues groups come in and play, but sporadically. Nothing you could depend on. So that’s when we decided to build a club.”
Before meeting Freeman, I checked out Clarksdale. Driving into town on backcountry roads from Memphis, via Elvis’s home town of Tupelo, had been like following a musical family tree and was a more atmospheric way to arrive than on the four-lane Highway 61. It helped playing blues music loud on our sweep down the backwater trails.
Even the phrase “driving into Clarksdale” has a musical echo, in the title of Led Zeppelin’s blues album Walking into Clarksdale . Robert Plant is just one of many stars who pay homage to the blues at Ground Zero Blues Club.
“Every once in a while a music great will just slip into town quietly, unannounced,” Luckett said. “I’ve been told Elvis Costello’s down here. I’ve heard that three times. Dan Aykroyd’s come in. Paul Simon’s come by but was not allowed to get in because we were doing the TV shoot!”
The British connection to Clarksdale is strong. You could argue that the Rolling Stones effectively made the blues a global phenomenon. “[British bands] acknowledged these old blues masters that came out of this area. So that was the beginning, I think, of the recognition of this area for the blues,” Freeman said.
Without the blues, Clarksdale could be any other Southern town struggling in the recession. It’s not just that the sun-bleached shop walls are decorated with murals depicting jovial blues players, or historic monument plaques to the likes of Ike Turner or some blues giant . There is a vibe in Clarksdale that makes you want to stay .
It is a charismatic enough town living a revivalist past. The streets are lined with a mixture of plantation houses, shops and amenities such as the telephone exchange – all frozen in a Fifties time warp. Shabby chic, the fashionistas might call it.
When Freeman’s own restaurant, Madidi, became a victim of the recession, the dining options were what are colloquially called casual. Fancying something Southern, I was sent down to Ramon’s, a dining room south of town where fried shrimp with lashings of garlic is the speciality. It did not disappoint. Everything seems to be fried down south; healthy options remain north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
The reality is, if music is not your thing, then neither probably is Clarksdale. I am a music fan and could spend a week there soaking up every note and investigating historical sites such as the Riverside Hotel room where the blues singer Bessie Smith died.
So having only one day to spend in Clarksdale was almost worse than not going at all. Luckett was our secret weapon, though. Instead of spending limited time in the Blues Museum (highly recommended as it was), I was pointed in the direction of a recording studio called the Clarksdale Soundstage.
From the outside, it looks like what it used to be – an office. But inside new blues was being made; music distilled from the flat fields on the river bank and played on a discarded fuel-can guitar by one of the last remaining delta blues men, James “Super Chikan” Johnson.
“I’m 62 years old and I’m one of the last of the originals,” he said. Strumming a guitar made from a jerrycan similar to the ones on our Land Rover, he told us: “I was born into the blues. It was inherited. They used to have what they called front-porch parties, and somebody would be sitting on the porch playing a guitar while there’d be a yard full of kids and people out there dancing and drinking.”
Between downtown and Highway 61, in a part of town where houses still retain their wooden verandas, porch parties live on. The desire to express life through music has not gone away, even if the blues has now evolved into newer forms of music.
Freeman can often be found hanging out at his club, but not that night. However, he implored me to spend the evening at his joint, enjoying a band called the Beat Daddy s. It seemed fitting to round off a day in Clarksdale with a performance at Ground Zero. As I arrived, I found Super Chikan’s plaque in the blues walk of fame embedded in the pavement , surrounded by old sofas and a shoeshine chair.
Ground Zero is, in part, a shrine to Freeman. Portraits behind the bar show the club’s owner with a guitar. The truth is, he’s only an enthusiastic amateur. And once the Beat Daddys started and their energetic blues rock (with song titles such as the appropriate Fuel for My Blues) filled the old factory floor and made my bottle of beer vibrate, thoughts of Hollywood and the club’s famous owner evaporated.
Freeman would not want it any other way. He might be famous but, as the fate of his restaurant shows, his fame alone cannot save the blues. He is simply giving it a nudge into a brighter future.
“It’s to our benefit to sell the blues,” he said before we parted under the oak tree. “And in selling the blues we’re selling Clarksdale, and in selling Clarksdale, we’re selling Mississippi.”
By Jeremy Hart from the Daily Telegraph UK