Morgan Freeman can add record producer to his long list of accolades across his six-decade career, as the iconic actor is partnering with a collection of celebrated blues musicians to deliver a 12-song album that documents 100 years of the blues.
Freeman is both the producer and narrator on the project, titled Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience. The album will release Aug. 7 through 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 in a statement.
The actor tapped a mixture of legendary and more contemporary blues musicians for the project, including Taj Mahal, Keb’ Mo’ and Shemekia Copeland. The album starts with Blind Willie Johnson’s famed “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” and covers the whole history of the blues’ evolution from the Mississippi Delta region and beyond, with covers of songs like “The Thrill Is Gone” and “Traveling Riverside Blues,” among others.
The album concludes with a cover of the Oscar-nominated Sinners track “I Lied to You,” a fitting full-circle moment given that the film and its music helped reintroduce the mysticism of the blues to a much wider, younger mainstream audience last year.
To commemorate Juneteenth, Freeman is previewing the album with the release of Mahal’s cover of Son House’s “Death Letter Blues.” Mahal provides vocals and slide guitar on the song, and he’s accompanied on the track by a cinematic string section.
“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 Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience, said in a statement that “this music was born from the same history that Juneteenth commemorates.”
“‘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, born in Memphis and raised in the Mississippi Delta region, has long been a fan of the blues, and he’s the co-owner of the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi. While this is Freeman’s biggest foray into music, it isn’t his first time appearing on an album. He was featured on the B.O.B. song “Bombs Away” back in 2012, and he served as narrator on Metro Boomin and 21 Savage’s 2020 collaborative album Savage Mode II. He worked with Metro again to narrate the producer’s 2022 album Heroes and Villains.