Morgan Freeman has added a new title to a career already full of them: recording artist. The Oscar winner released his first-ever album, Morgan Freeman's Symphonic Blues Experience, on August 7 via Decca Records - a 12-track project tracing 100 years of blues history, arriving just one year shy of his 90th birthday.
Freeman serves as producer and narrator on the album, which pairs Delta blues traditions with full orchestral arrangements from the Chineke! Orchestra, a majority-Black ensemble based in London. The collection features collaborations with blues veterans Taj Mahal, Keb' Mo', Shemekia Copeland and producer Lawrence "Boo" Mitchell, and spans from Blind Willie Johnson's 1927 recording "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" to a cover of "I Lied to You" from the film Sinners. One standout track, "I'll Take You There," brings the gospel tradition directly into the project, featuring vocalist Tierinii Jackson alongside the Stax Music Academy Choir.
For Freeman, the project traces back to his childhood in the Mississippi Delta. "I heard the blues for the first time on my grandmother's porch in the Mississippi Delta, and it has never left me," he said in a statement.
The album's lead single, a cover of Son House's "Death Letter Blues" featuring Taj Mahal, was released on Juneteenth - a date Freeman said was chosen deliberately, given the blues' roots in African American spirituals and gospel traditions carried north from slavery-era churches. "Releasing this on Juneteenth is not just symbolic - it is the truth of where this music comes from and who made it," he said. "I hope people listen and remember."
Freeman, who co-founded Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi 25 years ago, is supporting the album with a three-city tour that began August 7 in Houston and continues September 26 in Memphis and October 17 in Gulfport, Mississippi.
