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BEYOND: He finds mighty river in Muddy Waters

As blues legend, Wright plumbs emotional complexity of lyrics, experience

By | Friday, December 5, 2008

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For the shape-shifting character actor Jeffrey Wright ("Broken Flowers," "Syriana") taking on the role of blues legend Muddy Waters in "Cadillac Records" turned out to be an opportunity to explore black American cultural history and even his own personal roots.

"I had an early admiration for and fascination with the language of the rural black South," the native Washingtonian, 42, says. "The blues is that language, heightened."

"Cadillac Records" recounts the history of Chess Records, the storied Chicago label whose artists electrified the country blues of the Mississippi Delta and helped pioneer the basic vocabulary and musical structure of early rock 'n' roll.

Despite singing on the movie's soundtrack, Mr. Wright says, "I still don't consider myself a singer." However, he has noodled on guitar for 20-odd years. He recalls playing the blues for an elderly grandfather in southern Virginia: "I played a few notes. He smiled at me quietly and nodded his approval. I knew then that maybe I was onto something.

"What can't be notated in this music is tone and feeling," he continues. "That's what lends it a complexity. The notes are relatively straightforward - but the emotion is anything but.

"You can read the lyrics to these songs and still not be able to sing them. The shaping of words is so personal and specific to the black American South. The ways in which people claimed, crafted and personalized the language in their own image - that's one of the things I find so joyous about this music."

To Mr. Wright, the archetypal practitioners of the blues - Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Son House and the nameless bluesmen and -women who sang as they labored - are inspirational not merely for their art, but for their lives as well. "If artists can be heroic, then these guys were superheroes," he says. "They were slaves or a half step away from slavery. The extent to which their basic freedoms and rights were denied them was extraordinary."

That the blues morphed into rock ("I hear it with new ears now," he says) and indirectly undergirded the cultural upheavals of the 1960s - which contributed in some significant way to the downfall of Soviet communism - is a culmination of black America's quest for freedom, Mr. Wright avers.

"Rock represented a very specific Western and American idea of existential freedom, but the origins of that freedom have roots in black America," he explains.

Contrary to appearances, Mr. Wright doesn't necessarily gravitate toward roles, whether in film or onstage, that afford him the chance to get in touch with his inner sociologist. (He's a graduate of St. Albans and Amherst College.)