A thunderstorm has just passed over and the asphalt outside glistens in the drizzling rain. T he day before his birthday show we meet on his front porch in the Musician’s Village, a small neighborhood in New Orleans’s ninth ward that was rebuilt for musicians who lost their homes after Hurricane Katrina. He’s effectively risking his life again to do what he loves: play live. But I’m reminded that King has told me he has chosen not to take the Covid-19 vaccine. It’s the start of summer, before the Delta variant swept through Louisiana and before Hurricane Ida wrought havoc over the region, knocking out power in the city for a week.Īs revellers dance, beer flows, and people make out against the walls, the past year feels like a world away. It’s a line that has kept swirling in my head since watching him play that evening back in mid July. “But I thank the good Lord for bringing me back.” “I’ve been dead so many times,” he tells me. During the past 81 years he has survived three shootings, a handful of stabbings, a near fatal bike accident that pressed his spine, a stomach ulcer doctors believed would kill him, an accidental electrocution, the hurricane that ripped New Orleans apart in 2005, and now a pandemic that claimed the lives of a number of other musicians of his generation across this city. Little Freddie King has certainly paid his dues. Walk the streets with holes in their shoes, work a whole month without getting paid, like I did.’” “People ask me, ‘Do you think the younger guys play the blues like you play?’ And I say: ‘No way.’ That’s because they didn’t go through what I went through. “It comes from the heart and the soul and the feeling, and also the depression that you went through” he says, when we meet the day before his birthday show. It’s fluid tempo and timing, harmonica riffs, and stories that tell the tales of growing up poor in the Magnolia state and then life in New Orleans. One cable, straight from guitar to amp, no effects or overdrive. He plays an often chaotic, dirty form of country blues – “gutbucket”, as he defines it. His shows can feel like a transport back in time. Born Fread Eugene Martin in 1940 in the small town of McComb, Mississippi, he has ridden the peaks and troughs of New Orleans’s fortunes since he hopped the train south as a teenager. One of the last bluesmen of his generation in a city famed for its jazz, King has become a local emblem over the years. ‘People ask me, ‘do you think the younger guys play the blues like you play?’ And I say: ‘No way.’ That’s because they didn’t go through what I went through.’ Photograph: Akasha Rabut/The Guardian
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