Morgan Freeman's Got the Blues
March 29 -- Actor Morgan Freeman's got the blues, and he's bringing them to his Mississippi hometown.
Freeman may work in Hollywood, but he lives in Clarksdale, Miss., where he plans to open The Ground Zero Blues Club, which he says will be "a traditional blues, gut-bucket juke joint à la Robert Johnson or whoever else."
"We're going to open sometime this summer, maybe in June, maybe in May, maybe not until in July," he says. "I have a partner down there, and we've just built a restaurant that is really exciting and good. And because Clarksdale is what it is — we call it 'ground zero for the blues,' this is where the blues supposedly originated — we have people coming there from all over the world [saying], 'Where can we hear the blues?' There already are a couple of places there, but they're not set — you may or may not get music on a particular night. So we're going to open a juke joint, and it's called Ground Zero."
Freeman says his immediate plans for Ground Zero don't include booking bands seven days a week, but he adds, "There will definitely will be music on the weekends."
"We'll start with Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights; we're going to run the blues into the ground until two o'clock in the morning. And we're going to have an in-house band and of course we're going to have guest groups come whenever."
The actor describes his own taste in music as "pretty much eclectic" and admits he's been known to strum a guitar every now and then.
So will Ground Zero launch Freeman onto the lucrative career path of "actor turned musician," along the lines of Bruce Willis, and more successfully, Jennifer Lopez?
"I can play, but I'm not good, although I have a good time," he says, laughing. "I only learned folk chords, you know. C, F, G major. I'm not switching gears at all. I'm strictly an actor, but I'm going along with a couple of friends who are business entrepreneurs; I don't have to be a businessman, I just go along."
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