Morgan Freeman is partnering with a series of celebrated blues musicians for an album charting 100 years of the blues.
Freeman serves as both the producer and narrator on the project, titled ‘Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience’, which is set for release on August 7 via Decca Records.
“Rooted in stories carried from West Africa to the American South, the blues became a testament to the unbroken human spirit, the sound of America’s past and present, and the heartbeat of a culture that refused to be forgotten,” Freeman said of the album, per The Hollywood Reporter.
The actor enlisted a mix of legendary and more contemporary blues artists for the project, including Taj Mahal, Keb’ Mo’ and Shemekia Copeland. The album starts with Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground’ and covers the entire history of the blues’ evolution from the Mississippi Delta region and beyond.
It will also feature covers of songs like B.B. King’s ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, ‘Traveling Riverside Blues’, and concludes with a cover of the Oscar-nominated Sinners track ‘I Lied to You’, which helped introduce blues to a new, younger audience last year.
To commemorate Juneteenth on Friday (June 19), Freeman previewed the album with the release of Mahal’s cover of Son House’s ‘Death Letter Blues’ and reflected on its personal significance to him.
“I heard the blues for the first time on my grandmother’s porch in the Mississippi Delta, and it has never left me,” Freeman said. “Son House was one of the great truth-tellers of that tradition. Taj Mahal is one of the great truth-tellers of this one. Releasing this on Juneteenth is not just symbolic – it is the truth of where this music comes from and who made it. I hope people listen and remember.”
Eric Meier, a producer on the record, said in a statement that “this music was born from the same history that Juneteenth commemorates”. The holiday celebrates the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States.
“‘Death Letter Blues’ is one of the rawest, most honest pieces in the American songbook, and hearing Taj Mahal inhabit it with a full symphony behind him — recorded between the hallowed walls of Royal Studios and Abbey Road — is something that is groundbreaking and unique,” Meier said. “We’re incredibly proud to introduce our album with this track.”
Freeman has long been a fan of the blues, and co-owns of the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
The ‘Symphonic Blues Experience’ album marks this is Freeman’s biggest foray into music, after previously featuring on B.O.B.’2012 track ‘Bombs Away’. He also served as a narrator on Metro Boomin and 21 Savage’s 2020 collaborative album ‘Savage Mode II’, and worked with Metro again to narrate the producer’s 2022 album Heroes and Villains’.