anecdotes, including how he arrived in New York from Mississippi with $300 in his pocket when he was in his early 20s, only to spend it all on dance lessons for him and his friends, Freeman opens up a bit about his fashion tastes. “I’m not a fashion person, I only own two suits,” he confesses. But he says this while wearing Salvatore Ferragamo shoes and a Dolce & Gabbana tailor-made suit! Not bad for someone who doesn’t like fashion. “My favourite designer is Giorgio,” he adds. There is no doubt that he means Armani. After this, Freeman asks me to have breakfast with him. What can you talk about when you’re having breakfast with a man who was God (it was in a movie, I know)? Well, anything and everything, as there is almost no topic you can’t discuss with the iconic actor.
Morgan Freeman takes a break at Ground Zero, his blues bar in Mississippi
winter 2015
THE BLUES Q: We’re doing the interview here at the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale. This is where, as legend has it, famous blues pioneer Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for mastering the blues. Why did you decide to open a blues club? Did you have any reason to open it here? A: I started hanging out with Bill [Luckett, his business partner] after meeting him in 1996. He and I both noticed that there were a lot of people in Clarksdale from out of the country wandering around the streets saying, “where can we find some blues?” Bill has always been a very big ambassador for Clarksdale. There was a little place called the Crossroads that would have some of the blues guys play, but there was nothing stable around. So he decided that “this place needs a real downtown joint, a real blues club! I’m gonna find a building.” I said, “Why don’t you let me help?” He said “sure.” Anyway, we found this building, and he decided on the architecture. It looked pretty much like it looks now except for the writing on the wall, the plaques. He didn’t want to make it look like … it had to look like an old juke joint. This was twelve years ago, in ’02. That was the genesis of Ground Zero. We also had a very nice restaurant for ten years, but it never made any money so we closed it. Q: You live not very far from where you grew up, in Tennessee, and then in Mississippi. Why did you choose to settle here? Do you feel a special connection to this region? A: It goes back to my great-great grandparents. Probably further back than that. But that’s as far as I was able
to track it. My grandmother was born in the Delta, my mother too. My biological father and my stepfather were born there too. I have deep roots here. Q: That’s why you moved back out here? A: No, that’s not really why. I did a lot of travelling myself. I left when I was eighteen. In my travels, it occurred to me that this whole racial issue in the United States, we didn’t have … we weren’t the capital of it. It’s everywhere, almost. Q: It wasn’t unique to Mississippi. A: It wasn’t. So my parents moved back from Nashville, in ’56 or ’57, bought some property not far from where I grew up as a little boy. My second wife and I started coming to visit in the seventies, and every time we came here, I had the same feeling of comfort I had as a child. And I thought, “this is the best place in the world!” Q: I interviewed Robert De Niro and he said the same thing — his office is very close to the neighbourhood in New York where he grew up. A: I had to decide where I was going to put roots down and build a house. I lived in New York and really got sick of New York; I was getting actual stomach pains from the tension and the stress! That was in the eighties, when things were changing so rapidly. I lived on the Upper West Side. There was a wonderful neighbourhood there for a little while. Then we started getting this gentrification movement. The oil crisis in the seventies started putting landlords in a bind. They couldn’t sustain buildings. In New York, they had rent control — you couldn’t raise the rent. If you can’t raise the rent and everything else is going up, pretty soon a building is a loss. All those old people living in those rent-controlled buildings were now at loose ends. It was in the eighties that New York became one of the capitals of homelessness. Not a good place to be. But coming down here was like moving to paradise! We did this in the mid-eighties. Q: You decided to open a blues club. Are you a blues fan yourself? A: I’m a music fan. Yes, I’m a blues fan. I grew up with this music in the Delta. All those old blues guys. None of the guys that play here at the club are as old as I am, but they remind me of the guys who were playing just like this — amateur guys who played guitar, sitting on the front porch or the back porch drinking moonshine, playing the blues [Laughs]. Q: Do you have a favourite blues man? www.dolcemag.com
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DOLCE MAGAZINE 43