Liz DeLillo
Staff Writer
Continuing Week Nine’s Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “Past Informs Present: How to Harness History,” Tuesday’s morning lecture in the Amphitheater featured an array of the musicians and creative team behind “Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience,” with Morgan Freeman himself at the heart of it all.
In a discussion moderated by Chautauqua Institution Chief Program Officer Deborah Sunya Moore, Freeman and Eric Meier — co-owners of the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi — started off the lecture and were later joined by tour manager Tameal Edwards, conductor Martin Gellner and blues musicians Anthony “Big A” Sherrod, Adrienne “Lady Adrena” Ervin, and Keith Johnson. The lecture served in many ways as an introduction to Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience, which would be performed in the Amp just hours later with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra.
“I was raised primarily in Mississippi with a few excursions outside, but the best of my growing up was spent in Mississippi in the Delta — Greenwood, Mississippi, to be exact,” said Freeman, who — beyond his role as Ground Zero’s co-owner — is an Academy Award-winning actor, producer and narrator, considered by many to be one of the greatest actors of all time.
Rather than any formal introduction to the blues, Freeman came to know it by simply being there in the Delta.
“My association with the blues is really not an association at all,” Freeman said. “It’s just there in the air. You start hearing it at a very young age, because there are a lot of guys going around plucking on guitars and singing sad songs. The blues has this beginning with African Americans because working in the fields, they had a work holler, as it were.”
Meier, unlike Freeman, isn’t a native of the Mississippi Delta, but he was struck by the area and its history upon his very first visit.
“It’s a very unique place. The culture is unique, (and) the stories are unique,” Meier said. “… Whether it’s rock or gospel or hip-hop, it all started with the foundational music of the Delta, which were work songs, to Morgan’s point.”
Beyond the blues, Meier explained how he became involved with Ground Zero.
“By a weird series of events, I was lucky enough to meet this guy and the mayor of the town of Clarksdale, who is a lifelong friend of Morgan’s,” Meier said. “They had started this blues club called Ground Zero with Howard (Stovall), which was a cotton warehouse converted into a place to hear world-class, authentic blues.”
They’ve been partners for eight years now.
“We have had a blast doing it,” Meier said. “… I feel blessed to work with Morgan and Howard and frankly the people of the community.”
Freeman spoke about one of the original co-founders and former Clarksdale mayor, Bill Luckett, who passed away in 2021.
“My partner at the time, my friend, was a lawyer. His name was Bill — William Oliver Luckett,” Freeman said. “He was a people person, and one day we were working on refurbishing a building that we were going to put this restaurant in. And across the street were these two young people, obviously backpackers.”
Luckett approached them, asking what they were looking for and if he could help.
“And they said, ‘Where can we hear blues?’ And we couldn’t tell them. There was no place in Clarksdale that we could say, ‘this club’ — it’s nowhere,” Freeman said. “So we decided, ‘OK, got to do something about that.’ … Not long after that, we opened Ground Zero Blues Club, and over the years, it grew in popularity so that now, 30% of our audience will be from out of the country.”
Meier recalled his first visit to Ground Zero.
“I took a trip down to Clarksdale to see what Morgan and Bill had built,” Meier said. “In my heart, I felt this was a great American brand. It’s a genre that’s largely not known by a lot of folks — hopefully more tonight — and (I) said, this would be a fun way to spend time with amazing people.”
More than the enjoyment it brought him, however, was what it could do for the Mississippi Delta.
“Morgan and Bill, who’s since passed, were renaissance guys — and Howard (Stovall) as well, (who) grew up on his farm (and) felt like this would be a fun way to spend time in, frankly, a part of the country that needs help,” Meier said. “Through the graciousness of Morgan and others, there’s people leaning in, and I thought this would be an important way to spend time.”
Blues musician Keith Johnson joined Freeman and Meier onstage, introducing himself to the Amp audience.
“Muddy Waters’ dad’s name is Ollie Morganfield, so that would be my great-great-grandfather,” Johnson said. “(He) was a self-taught guitar player. His first son was Fred, my great-grandfather, and the next son is McKinley.”
Muddy Waters, or McKinley Morganfield, is an iconic bluesman and considered a pioneer of the Chicago blues scene — a legacy that followed Johnson.
“I went to Delta State University to study audio engineering, and of course I joined the band,” he said. “When they found that out — ‘You have to play a Muddy Waters song. You have to do this.’ ”
So, he performed Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man,” from 1954.
“From then on, I got into it and decided to carry on the legacy of the Morganfield family — Muddy Waters’ legacy,” Johnson said. “My grandfather, my mom — everyone in the family — is a self-taught musician, self-taught guitarist and harmonica player. It’s in the DNA for us to do what we do today.”
Recounting her first time inside Ground Zero, Symphonic Blues Experience tour manager Tameal Edwards explained how she initially had doubts about the place.
“I’m fussing the entire way until I open the door, and I stood at the door and said, ‘What is this place?’ And I come in,” Edwards said. “I still remember what I ate: a pulled pork sandwich, onion rings, and a stress-reliever rum punch cocktail. I had folks from France to the right, Florida on the left, and a big table of people from Italy.”
Of course, the ambiance wasn’t all that struck her about Ground Zero.
“I was sitting on the bar stool, and the first (performance) I saw there was LaLa Craig. She’s an awesome piano player, and her hair is flying,” Edwards said, and she remembered thinking, “I have to work at this place. I want a piece of it.”
Musician Keith Johnson’s first encounter with the club came about differently.
“Actually, Ground Zero made their way to me,” Johnson said. “… It’s this famous club, and I’m a guy on the college campus eating beans and rice, trying to make a living. So when I got the opportunity and put on the best suit that I had in the closet — one of two — and I got on stage and just, the energy was wild.”
While that energy was wild, it was far from unfamiliar.
“It reminded me so much of home and Glen Allan, Mississippi, where we fry fish, where we cook the beans. The energy — it reminded me so much of home,” Johnson said. “… By then in Clarksdale, Mississippi, everything aligned. … It was destiny for me. It was my destiny, and I haven’t left since, and I hope I don’t leave.”
Meier described how Ground Zero fits into the city of Clarksdale.
“I think it’s part of the community,” Meier said. “The one thing that’s no different from here is you want to keep it authentic. Clarksdale has made the experiences authentic — the look and feel of the club, the musicians. We’re fortunate that a number of our musicians hail from the Delta, like Keith (Johnson).”
Their work not only serves the community in the Mississippi Delta, but the blues as well.
“I think the club and the music and the history of the blues has done wonders for the community,” Meier said. “But the other point is this is that it’s living, which I think aligns with really the focus of this week. … The blues is alive and well. The majority of the musicians here tonight are under the age of 40, which I think bodes incredibly well in the music’s evolving.”
With the club founded in 2001, that success didn’t simply occur overnight.
“This experience — not just the Symphonic Experience, but the club itself — it’s something that got started, and it’s now running on its own energy,” Freeman said. “… I think the experience of just, blues itself — Ground Zero Blues Club has its own momentum, and now we are here to interact with all of you, and I’m certain you’re going to enjoy it.”
Conductor Martin Gellner elaborated that when one learns to play guitar, the first thing they learn is the blues scale.
“It’s five notes and you cannot go wrong when you play them,” Gellner said. “… I became a pop producer, but always studied classical music. I wanted to learn to play guitar, so this is exactly where I live. I love (classical) music, I love the blues, I love rock, and this is the crossover happening.”
Weaving together an orchestra and the blues is a unique task for arranging music.
“This is the whole interesting magic about it, to marry these two worlds. … The blues is all about (the) parallel fifth — so how do you do this?” Gellner said. “… An orchestra is a beautiful body of music. Blues, pop, rock, is a lot about interpretation and sound, and you have to keep that.”
Typically, the older the blues song, the less formal notation.
“Some of the early songs were the hardest, but these turned out to be my most-loved arrangements now. It’s two, three chords and how do you arrange that?” Gellner said. “… So I arranged this beautiful guitar playing of the blues masters, who play everything on one guitar with two hands, into an orchestra. So what you hear is the orchestra playing a big guitar.”
Anthony “Big A” Sherrod, who now teaches in Clarksdale in addition to performing, shared some of his musical background. His father had a regular gospel group at their house, he said, and Big A was the only of 12 kids to stay up for those nights, joining in with spoons.
“One day, my dad surprised me with my first guitar at the age of 2 years old (and) sat it in my lap,” Big A said. “… I found the key that they were singing in. So the manager of the group, he’s like, ‘Everybody be quiet. Y’all listen. He found our key. One day, he’s going to be something else.’ ”
Adrienne “Lady Adrena” Ervin also became acquainted with music early on as a kid.
“I’m a Southern Baptist and started singing at the age of 5,” she said. “… I did my first solo, and my mom told me I had a standing ovation.”
That performance was only the tip of the iceberg.
“Early on, I snuck out of the house to a party across the street where they were playing blues and sung three songs and snuck back inside,” Lady Adrena said. “I grew up on the blues. My family loves the blues, so I was always musically inclined. I didn’t choose the blues, the blues chose me.”
One of the songs Lady Adrena was set to perform Tuesday night was Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues” — more of a rock song, she said, and “I was scared of that song at first. It was a little out of the box for me, but Martin (Gellner) said, ‘Just go in there and sing it. Sing it like you know how to sing it.’ And when I did that, I fell in love with the song. I listen to it every day now.”
The panel was joined by more musicians, including Jaxx Nassar, a multi-instrumentalist. The group of blues musicians performed “I Lied To You,” from the film “Sinners,” with Freeman ending on a note of pride for the authentic juke joint.
“This young lady over here on the guitar, she’s been doing that since she was a little girl,” Freeman said. “She started at Ground Zero.”
