Free, At Last


Dorchester Reporter
May 30, 2002
By Bill Forry


Free, At Last
Dorchester's Marie Wright Now an Icon of Hip Hop Culture



It's halftime at a Celtics playoff game and Marie Wright, a.k.a. 'Free', hasn't had a moment's peace.

Antoine Walker hooked her up with courtside seats, right off the aisle, to watch her hometown team take it to the Detroit Pistons. If she actually wanted to watch the game, though, Free- as she's known to millions of fans- probably would have had more luck staying home.

A constant stream of fans - little kids in drooping tank-tops, middle aged men in double-breasted suits, twenty-something coeds- have set up camp around her section, waiting for a chance to talk or get an autograph.

The Celts' fans in her row aren't too thrilled, but if Free's at-all annoyed, it doesn't show. She gives them all the time she wants. Maybe it's because she was just like them until celebrity struck her like lightening two years ago.

For millions of hip-hop fans who tune into her top-rated show on the Black Entertainment Television (BET) every weeknight, Free is the ambassador of hip-hop culture. As co-host of "106 & Park", a show particularly popular with teens and young adults tuned into the culture of rap and R&B, Free is now as big as some of the artists she interviews each night.


Marie "Free" Wright, second from left, on the 106& Park set with co-host AJ and Destiny's Child


The hour-and-a-half show also happens to be the biggest hit the cable network has had-ever. In an April article, Newsweek magazine dutifully pointed out that Free's 106 & Park is not only giving comp to industry behemoth MTV, it's actually beating the music channel in it's evening time slot.

And Free, a self-described "sneaker-and-sweats" Dorchester girl at heart, is now a bona fide fashion trend setter, with her trademark Afro and plans for launching her own line of boots that she's popularized on the show. While she's at it, she's also busy recording her debut album, a "soulful hip-hop" record that is almost sure to get high-profile exposure- and sales.

Welcome to world of Free, circa 2002.

Now, hit rewind.

Marie Wright was born to a tight-knit family on Nightingale Street sometime in the 1970s (her actual age is a tightly held music industry secret). Her father, who recently retired from his longtime job at Lucent Technologies, met mom Selena in their old neighborhood of Mission Hill. Mrs. Wright got her start in community health centers, working at what is now Geirger-Gibson Health Center on Columbia Point. The Wrights moved to Dorchester when they started their family, which included Marie and her brother.

Marie went to the Murphy Elementary School in Neponset- and then the Grover Cleveland in Fields Corner before heading off to the old Boston Tech (now John D. O'Bryant High).

Her real love, though, was dance, an obsession that was crafted into skill under the tutelage of teacher Andrea Herbert at the Roxbury Center for Performing Arts. Free first started there at age 4 when her parents first noticed her ear for music, which in her house included everything from the O'Jays to Rapper's Delight.

"My father loved music and I always had it around me," Free says. "MC Lyte and Queen Latifah really inspired me too, when I saw women doing it, like Janet Jackson."

"I just remember always dancing. We had nowhere to go to do our shows, but we'd do our dance steps right there on the porch."

Andrea Herbert Major, Free's dance teacher until age 16, says she was not surprised the day she found her son watching 106 & Park and talking about his favorite TV personality.

"She has a beautiful voice," said Major. "When she was with me, she was energetic, a beautiful personality. And there was no attitude. It doesn't surprise me to see where she is now. Her mom and dad were very much in her corner."

Marie followed her father's footsteps to Tech, even though she now says she would have been better off going next door to Madison Park, where the emphasis was more on the arts. Undaunted, Marie started up a singing group with friends and made the rounds of neighborhood talent shows. When the group dynamic didn't work out, Marie broke ranks, started rapping solo- and adopted her M.C. moniker, 'Free.'

"People were always saying, you can't do this, you can't do that. I decided to name myself 'Free' because if you always listen to what people say, they can stop you from doing what you want to do. I just want to be able to do what I want to do, be me, and not worry about what everybody says."

The road to stardom wasn't quite that easy, of course. As she took junior college courses and interned at WILD, Free started working on her rap career with local rap producers- and danced with another fledgling Dorchester-born rapper, Marky Mark, on his breakthrough video "Good Vibrations.

Through much of the nineties, Free moved up the ranks at the Conservation Law Foundation, starting as a receptionist and ending up as manager of the office computer systems. (Not bad for a girl who flunked computers in high school, she notes.)

Her pursuit of a record contract meant repeated journeys to New York- and Los Angeles, a side-project generously supported by her non-profit employer.

Like most hungry hip-hop artists, Free knew that Boston's concrete ceiling was way too low for her ambitions. Hitting the road was a requirement.

"I wasn't afraid of going to other cities. You have to be in the music business to be in it," Free counsels. "And Boston has artistic and music capabilities, but the labels and the people in the shows and showcases aren't here. You have to go and show yourself."

Her first break came about five years ago, when a rhyme she recorded found its way onto a mix tape in the Big Apple. The otherwise unknown rapper made an impression on Priority Records in L.A., who signed her to a short-lived record deal.

"It didn't work out," Free now confesses. "The producer wanted to write and record everything and I had a problem with that."

True to her name, Free sought an escape through old-school rap legend Heavy D, whom she met during her three months in California. Heavy introduced her to Wyclef Jean, the Haitian-born, New Jersey-bred star who had just launched his own record label.

"Wyclef saved my life, because he got me out of the deal," says Free, who signed onto her new mentor's Refugee All Stars label and came back to Boston to start work on her debut album. It was still a work-in-progress in July 2000 when the industry dealt her another blow: Columbia Records dropped Wyclef's fledgling label, and Free was 'freed' once more.

That same night, fate crossed her plate again at a New York City party, where she bumped into old friend Stephen Hill from WILD, who filled her in on the latest opportunity: BET was holding an open casting call the next morning for a new line-up of shows. Free, down-but-not-out over her latest set-back, sucked it up and joined 700 other would-be V.J.'s at an audition.

Free says she "didn't even know what a teleprompter was" at the time, but BET producers later said she was the only talent hired that day by unanimous consent. Less then two weeks later, she and co-host "A.J." were on air, live, in front of millions of viewers coast-to-coast.

"I never thought I would be doing TV so I wasn't prepared for it. They gave us a class for a week-and-a-half, then they put us in front of a camera and said 'Go!'"

On one of the first outings, Free welcomed stand-up comedian and actor Jamie Foxx to the stage. When the over-the-top Foxx started hitting on Free on live TV, she gave it right back to him.

"I didn't know what to do at first. Marie would've checked him on the street, but I didn't know my ground. But we just made our ground. I thought, I'm gonna be completely myself and whatever I say on the show, whatever I do, I'm just me."

Needless to say, Foxx found out pretty fast how a Dorchester girl handles herself.

After a slow start, BET's newest entry into the video sweepstakes really found an audience among the "urban youth" in 2001. Aided by live, in-studio performances by the biggest names in hip-hop, the show also features a top-ten countdown of videos selected by call-ins. The format is straight MTV, but the flavor is decidedly BET- with a raucous studio audience of teenagers and college kids who invariably become part of the spectacle. On Fridays, aspiring rappers square off in a "battle" of oneupmanship, trading rhymes and insults in the great tradition of hip hop rivalries.

Right: Free and co-host AJ

Free, though, is careful to keep things under control, wary of the kind of rap feuds that led, at least indirectly, to the deaths of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur in the 1990s.

"The battle thing is such a part of hip-hop, you can't erase it. But we encourage those in hip hop and those who watch to view it as sport. It's supposed to be fun and challenging and at the end you're supposed to shake hands.

"I'm adamant that I'm not going to sit here on this couch and fuel a fire and then the next week have to say this person has died. I refuse to do that. And BET wants the same thing."

Others kinds of tragedies have crept onto the 106 & Park set, however. Last August, Free had to announce to her audience the sudden death of rising star Aaliyah, a loss that still has Free reeling. Aaliyah had been on the show just a week before her death and had invited Free to join her on a doomed trip to the Bahamas, where she died along with her entourage in a small plane crash.

Just days after Aaliyah's funeral, Free was on air within hours of the attack on the World Trade Center. From her studio in uptown Manhattan, Free shared the pain and confusion of the day with a vulnerable audience of young people.

Mostly, though, Free has used her BET soapbox to have fun- and to give props, when needed, to her sometimes beleagured hometown.

When it comes to representing Boston, Free is in a league all her own. When the Patriots traveled to the Super Bowl in New Orleans, Free was front-and-center and may have been the only national TV star to publicly root for the Pats in the days leading up to their super upset. More recently, she has been wearing her Celtic green on air, much to the chagrin of the many, many New Yorkers in her midst.

"I'm from here and I'm proud of Boston. I find myself always defending Boston because it's always called a racist city. They say, 'Oh you grew up in Boston? They got black people in Boston?' These are the things I get in the hip-hop community. I'm always defending it: 'Hell yeah we've got a hip-hop community!'"

That community promises to grow stronger under Free's watch, as she uses her star power to bring more local acts to the national stage- and help more national hip-hop performers find their way north.

She also intends to help neighborhood kids through a new foundation she has started with her mother's help. The Free for Life Foundation will target young girls for starters, helping them learn financial literacy and connecting them with activities like the dance school that Free credits with much of her success.

The Foundation will kick off with a concert at Franklin Park on June 16th, featuring hip-hop performances. In the meantime, she's continuing work on her own record, which will likely launch the next phase of her blossoming career.

Whatever happens, you can bet that Marie 'Free' Wright will always find her way home.

"I've always got love for Boston. If I'm not back here once a month, I'm itching. Boston was good to me. I love the city and there's no way I'm adopting another one. This is home."