Accommodations were virtually out of the question, with most hotels and boarding houses serving only white patrons. The group usually slept in the car; more often than not, they changed clothes at the churches and auditoriums where they performed. It was much easier to find lodging after a night of singing, when, explains Freeman, “Sister and Brother So-and-So would say,” ‘I’ll take two of y’all,’ or whatever.”
Then there was the night the Fairfields shared a bill at an outdoor event in either Mississippi or Alabama with several white acts. According to Jerry Zolten, who heard the story from Sam McCrary, the group’s members were arrested for breaking a local ordinance that prohibited black people from appearing at the same event as white performers. Country superstar Red Foley was also on the program, though, and he stood up to the show’s promoters, swearing he wouldn’t go on unless the authorities allowed the Fairfields to sing as well, which they finally did.
Nevertheless, persistent encounters with racism during this era doubtless took a toll on the Fairfield Four. Complicating matters was the fact that, by the late ’40s, contemporary gospel, with its emphasis on star soloists and instrumental accompaniment, had begun to supplant a cappella harmony quartets, making it a lot tougher for the Fairfields to get bookings. On top of that, the group’s joint business venture, a funeral parlor, went belly up due to mismanagement. Each of these things contributed to the demise of the Fairfield Four’s most prodigious lineup, which included McCrary, Hill, Freeman, Edward “Preacher” Thomas, Preston York, and longtime member Willie Frank Lewis. “Voice for voice,” historian Doug Seroff claims, this was “the strongest Fairfield Four lineup ever.” The group officially split up in 1950, with Hill, Freeman, and Thomas moving to Greenville, Alabama, to start a new quartet.
The Skylarks achieved considerable acclaim on the gospel circuit during the ’50s and early ’60s, enough to afford to stay in the same hotels as Sam Cooke. They also cut a number of soul-stirring sides, backed by electric guitar and a little piano, for Nashboro, the label run by pioneering Nashville record man Ernie Young.
Meanwhile, McCrary revived the Fairfield name, recruiting veteran tenors such as Willie Love and Willie “Little Axe” Broadnax (the latter of the Spirit of Memphis Quartet) to round out the lineup. But McCrary entered the ministry in 1954, and the edition of the Fairfields that soldiered on under his leadership worked only sporadically through 1960. That year they also made an album, produced by WLAC’s Hoss Allen, for RCA. By then, though, traditional gospel singing had fallen even further out of favor; with McCrary spending more of his time in the pulpit, the ensemble again called it quits.
“They couldn’t buy a concert [in the late ’50s],” says Lee Olsen, the group’s manager during the ’90s. “They had church singin’, and singin’ for the plate, but they lost their radio show; they weren’t the same Fairfield Four anymore.”
Indeed, if in the ’40s they were pocketing $600-$800 a week ($35 was the living wage), a decade later they couldn’t even tour and break even. It was no wonder that Sam Cooke and Clyde McPhatter, as well as Lou Rawls, Johnnie Taylor, Aretha Franklin and countless others, left the gospel fold to pursue careers in pop music.
The Skylarks, which featured Freeman and Hill, had similar offers — and at the time, Nashville was home to any number of young jump-blues stars, several of whom recorded for Ernie Young’s Excello imprint (which also owned Nashboro, the Skylarks’ label). “Mr. Young tried to get us to sing pop music, but I just couldn’t do it,” Hill said. “I wasn’t brought up that way.
“And then I saw them fellas [who had crossed over], how they’d change. Some of ’em didn’t last long, didn’t live long, and most of ’em didn’t amount to nothin’ recordin’ pop and R&B,” Hill added, alluding to Joe Henderson, the bass singer who took Freeman’s place in the Fairfields during early ’50s. Henderson had a good-sized R&B hit with “Snap Your Fingers” but, according to Freeman, “started doin’ a little bit of everything he wasn’t supposed to do.” Henderson was later found dead at home in his bathroom.
“I’ve often thought,” said Hill, “about that song that says, ‘What is it to gain the world and lose your soul?'”
But by the time the ’60s rolled around, Freeman and Hill were less worried about losing their souls than the shirts off their backs. “Sometimes we’d get out on the road and we just couldn’t make it,” Freeman says. “A lot of times we’d come home just like we left, with nothing. We’d go out there and stay two or three weeks and have nothin’ to show for it. We barely made enough for transportation and food.”
Thus it was that in 1962 the two men disbanded the Skylarks and moved back to Nashville. Hill joined the Metro Police Force, where he attained the rank of sergeant; Freeman worked in maintenance at the Metro Courthouse for five years before getting hired on at the local water company (from which he retired, after 30 years of service, in 1992). With McCrary preaching full-time at St. Mark’s Missionary Baptist Church, the Fairfield Four, it seemed, were a thing of the past. That is, until Doug Seroff asked McCrary to reassemble the group’s classic lineup, inactive for 30 years, for a quartet reunion he was organizing in Birmingham for the fall of 1980.
“I’m not sure any of us knew what to expect,” Hill recalled of the event. “They all had guitars and drums, and keyboards and things. But we went down there. And man, I don’t know what happened, but the quartet just caught on fire again.
“We were surprised that so many young people liked hearin’ us,” Hill added. “I guess they could hear what we were singin’. I don’t care if it’s a guy singin’ a song or a preacher preachin’ a sermon; it’s got to carry some message.”
The group began working a few dates again, such as the Smithsonian folklife event where they met Zolten. Even more auspicious was the Fairfields’ appearance, in 1990, as part of the Metro [Nashville] Arts Commission’s “Arts in the Airport” series. Singer Amy Grant heard the group that day and invited them to sing at a cancer benefit she was hosting at her home. Among those on hand for the event was Jim Ed Norman, president of Warner Bros. Nashville.
By all accounts, the Fairfields blew everyone away — including Norman, who caught up with them a day or so later and eventually signed them to a record deal. The Fairfields’ lineup then included Hill, Freeman, Walter Settles, Litt Waters, and W.L. “Preacher” Richardson. McCrary, alas, had died the previous year.
The Fairfields’ debut for Warner Bros., Standing In The Safety Zone, received a 1992 Grammy nomination, and they spent several months opening shows for Lyle Lovett. The quartet expected to get a warm, or at least polite, reception while on tour with Lovett, never anticipating the ecstatic responses they were met with each night.
“When we started singin’ with Lyle, man, those folks didn’t want us to quit,” Hill remembered. “Opening up for him, we had 30 minutes. But every night when it came time for us to stop, they wanted us to sing some more. Somethin’ just happens when we get out on that floor.”
It’s said that “God inhabits the praises of [God’s] people,” and that’s certainly the case with the Fairfield Four, whether they’re lifting their voices with Elvis Costello at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall or feeling the spirit in black worship back at home. The latter has always been the group’s element, even though for the past decade or so the people who have gathered to hear the Fairfields have been predominantly white.
