FILE - Bill Luckett, appearing as a pope, kneels beside the monument for the fictional Billy Joe McAllister made famous by former Greenwood resident, Bobbie Gentry's song "Ode to Billy Joe," at Tallahatchie Flats near Greenwood, Miss., Thursday afternoon, June 3, 2021. Bill Luckett was an attorney, small-town mayor, candidate for governor, blues promoter, friend and business partner of Morgan Freeman and irrepressible teller of tales about the people and culture of his beloved Mississippi. Luckett died Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021, a year after being diagnosed with cancer. He was 73. (Susan Montgomery/The Commonwealth via AP, File)

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Bill Luckett was an attorney, small-town mayor, candidate for governor, blues promoter, friend and business partner of Morgan Freeman and irrepressible teller of tales about the people and culture of his beloved Mississippi.

Luckett died Thursday at 73, a year after being diagnosed with cancer. He will be remembered Tuesday at a party he ordered up and would have loved to host.

Instead of a funeral, his family is having a celebration of Luckett’s life with free music and entertainment at Ground Zero Blues Club — the joint that he, the Academy Award-winning actor and others had owned for two decades in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

The club’s name refers to the the birthplace of the blues: Legend has it that early blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in the Mississippi Delta. Clarksdale stakes its claim with huge guitars marking the intersection of U.S. highways 61 and 49. Nearby Rosedale also claims to be the site of Johnson’s Faustian bargain. Luckett was often at Ground Zero to introduce acts and drink and dance with blues pilgrims who had traveled from far corners of the globe.

Luckett and Freeman, who lives near the Delta town of Charleston, also ran an upscale restaurant called Madidi, in Clarksdale for several years.

Luckett was part of the June Bugs, a loose-knit group of Mississippi politicians, judges and others — including U.S. District Judge Mike Mills and U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker — who celebrate the state’s musical and literary heritage, often with tongue-in-cheek presentations.

This year, the June Bugs held a ceremony near Greenwood to remember the fictional Billy Joe McAllister, the young man who ended his life by jumping from the Tallahatchie Bridge in “Ode to Billy Joe,” the 1967 his song by Mississippi-born Bobbie Gentry. The Greenwood Commonwealth reported that Luckett dressed as a pope and spoke about the possibility that Billy Joe committed some sins, including taking his own life by leaping into the Tallahatchie.