Denzel Washington tackles Shakespeare and life's fourth quarter with grace
LOS ANGELES — Denzel Washington and I have been talking for a good, long stretch on a recent late Friday afternoon, discussing life's fourth quarter, the September of our years, when, pretty much out of nowhere, he starts singing Neil Young's "Southern Man."
If you asked me to name, oh, I don't know, maybe a thousand songs that Washington might serenade me with on this day, "Southern Man" would not have cracked the list.
"Southern man, better keep your head ... don't forget what your good book said," Washington sings, performing a pretty spot-on approximation of Young's high tenor. He smiles. "One of my favorite songs of all time."
Washington had been remembering when he went away to boarding school in upstate New York as a teenager, following a youth spent in the house of his Pentecostal minister father, Denzel Washington Sr., where secular music wasn't allowed.
"Listen, you've got to understand," Washington tells me.
