The Fairfields have always been just as sublime in their more subdued moments. Witness, on the live CD for example, when Freeman sings lead on a toe-tingling version of “Crying In The Chapel”, a song that was a big pop and R&B hit for proto-doo-woppers the Orioles in 1953, and that Elvis Presley took to #3 on the pop charts twelve years later.
Zolten, however, didn’t need to hear Freeman’s version of “Crying In The Chapel”, which the singer had been performing since his days with the Skylarks, to know Dickie had a solo album in him. “When I used to travel with the group, they would sit behind me in the van and Dick would start singing some little something,” Zolten says. “I was always mesmerized. I loved to hear him sing; it didn’t matter what it was. Then we’d go to the event and the guy would step up to the mike and say something and the crowd would just go wild. It didn’t take long to make the connection that this guy had an extraordinary voice. And for a bass singer, he really knew how to handle a melody lead. Even on some of those old 78s he led tunes. So I knew he could do it.”
Freeman admits that he’d never given any thought to making a record of his own until Zolten broached the idea to him. “One day we were out on the road and Jerry came to me and said, ‘Have you ever thought about doin’ a solo album? I think maybe it’d be a good idea. So just let me know and I’ll see if I can get the ball rollin’.’
“So I thought about it and said, ‘OK, but what kind of record are you talkin’ about?’ And Jerry said, ‘Just go on back to when you was comin’ up and singin’ with your mother in church. You go on and get a few of those old numbers together, and the next time I go out on a trip with you guys, I’ll bring a guitar along and we’ll make some roughs.”
It didn’t take Freeman and Zolten long to work up those demos, and subsequent versions of “Because He Lives”, “Jesus Is On The Mainline” and “Don’t Take Everybody To Be Your Friend” made it onto the album. Zolten then talked Kieran Kane, whose Dead Reckoning label had put out the Fairfields’ Wreckin’ The House in 1998, into producing the record.
“I kind of inherited the project from Jerry,” explains Kane, who tapped the Bluebloods, the Nashville bluesbusters led by guitarist Mike Henderson, to back Freeman on the sessions. “I was really just a traffic cop. I mean, Mike and the ‘Bloods, they know what they’re doing. And Isaac is just such an amazing talent. It wasn’t my desire to get in the way of that talent, but to facilitate it. Sometimes that’s the job of a producer, to just stay out of the way.”
Freeman certainly appreciated Kane’s hands-off approach, citing it as the main reason he was so relaxed in the studio. “When I went in there to meet the guys, Kieran said, ‘Isaac, it’s all yours. I won’t interfere. If we cut a rough and you like it, great. If you don’t, we’ll go back and do it again.’
“So you see it wasn’t like goin’ in the studio where you got to satisfy everybody,” Freeman continues. “Nobody questioned me about nothin’ that I wanted to do, and that made me more comfortable. I just went in, took my shoes off, put the headsets on, and went on in the booth and sang.”
The ease Freeman felt working with Kane and the Bluebloods doubtless accounts for the loose-limbed grooves that suffuse the album, be it a juking call-and-response between Freeman’s pumping bass and Henderson’s jagged guitar shards, or Dickie calling out for one of the musicians to solo. Or, for that matter, those moments when Freeman introduces a track with a spoken recitation, his rumbling tones evoking the spirit of God moving over the waters.
Then again, with the dirty-toned Bluebloods — Henderson on guitar, Glenn Worf on bass, John Jarvis on piano, and John Gardner on drums — skinnin’ it back behind Freeman, the music on Beautiful Stars sounds less like it’s coming from a hushed sanctuary than a noisy roadhouse. Take tracks like “Lord I Want You To Help Me” and “Jesus Is On The Mainline”; with the a pair of sisters wailing above Freeman’s declaiming bass, the overall effect is something akin to Muddy Waters’ band backing the Staple Singers with Evelyn Starks of Dorothy Love’s Original Gospel Harmonettes rockin’ the house on piano. Elsewhere, on the autobiographical “You Must Begin In The Bottom”, for example, Freeman and his bass-slappin’, finger-poppin’ companions sound like they’ve just come from some boho poetry session.
Everything on Beautiful Stars was cut live except for those febrile female backing vocals, which were provided by Ann and Regina McCrary, daughters of the late Reverend Samuel H. McCrary, the most electrifying lead singer the Fairfields ever had. Freeman views the presence of the McCrary sisters as a fitting tribute to their father, the man who, some 50 years ago, had confidence enough in Dickie to appoint him musical director of the Fairfield Four, a role he still fulfills today.
Working with a band, as well as having his vocals offset by female voices, nevertheless involved a major adjustment for Freeman, who with the Fairfields sings a cappella, and with four other men, their only accompaniment being the clapping of their hands and the constant patter of their feet. Yet even more dramatic than these differences — and this despite the occasional leads he’s sung with the Fairfields — is the melodicism of Freeman’s vocals. Whereas rhythms have always predominated in the Fairfields’ music — and, specifically, the layering of vocal rhythms, in the tradition of African drumming — Freeman’s singing on Beautiful Stars is often so tied to the melody it’s tantamount to crooning.
“Yeah, you could say that,” he shrugs, cracking a smile, when asked as much, particularly with regard to the album’s title track, a number his mother used to sing in church. “For a long time, I’d say between the years of 1962 up until 1980, I was doin’ a lot of solos around town. See, this is the time the Skylarks broke off and Fairfield hadn’t started back to singin’ together again. So we weren’t doing nothin’. James and I, we came back to Nashville and got us some jobs. Now and again I’d get a call to do a solo here on this program and another solo there.
“So I was real familiar with what I wanted to do when it came down to singin’ lead on this album. It wasn’t really no problem for me to make that switch to singin’ solo. Besides, when I first started singin’ as a kid in a little group back home in Johns, Alabama, I was the lead singer. I sang lead until the day I decided I wanted to be a bass singer.”
