The same has been true of their collaborators, who have included everyone from Kevin Welch and Steve Earle to Pam Tillis and the Nashville Bluegrass Band. Raised on rock ‘n’ roll, this new generation of fans seems to appreciate, among other things, the way the Fairfields’ hard-driving rhythms anticipated those of Elvis, Little Richard, and the Beatles.
“It seems like the youngest crop of established country and bluegrass singers have this awareness of just how influential and central these quartet harmonies were,” Zolten observes. “The Oak Ridge Boys [think ‘Elvira’] can’t say enough about how influenced they were by black gospel, and the Nashville Bluegrass Band puts their cards right on the table. The older singers, everybody from Bob Wills to Bill Monroe, didn’t really play up the [black] roots of their tunes during their heyday. The musicians all knew it, but the public probably didn’t.”
The Fairfields, by the way, only recently started performing in overalls, costumes reminiscent of those worn by sharecroppers and field hands. Their latter-day stage dress (back in the day they wore white tie and tails) certainly lent itself to the roles that three of them played in the wryly nostalgic O Brother, Where Art Thou? — and not just to the way Freeman, Hamlett and Waters were cast as Jim Crow-era gravediggers, but to how they were asked to sing the old spiritual “Lonesome Valley” in a style that predates the hard gospel that’s the group’s stock-in-trade.
“We came up with two or three arrangements on that, but T Bone [Burnett] wanted an something closer to how the old people used to sing the hymns,” Freeman explains. “Well, I remembered how they sang ’em when I was comin’ up, so we ran over it like that and he liked it. That’s how we came up with that hymn sound.
“Man, I tell you, that was some experience,” Freeman adds enthusiastically. “Lee Olsen came to us and said, ‘They want you guys to participate in this movie they got comin’ called O Brother, Where Art Thou? — they gonna give you guys scripts and everything.’ And I said, ‘What part am I gonna be playin’?’ And he says, ‘I don’t know if it suits your fancy, but you’re gonna be the chief gravedigger.’ I said, ‘It don’t make me no difference. I’ll try it, whatever it is.’ So we went out to Hollywood and I was kind of elated about it. I said, ‘I’m gonna be in a movie!’ I never dreamed I’d be in a movie. It was fantastic and there wasn’t nothin’ to it. They didn’t ask me to do nothin’ I didn’t know how to do.”
Inevitably, the appearance of just three members of the Fairfield Four in O Brother serves as a reminder that several of the group’s older singers have passed on in recent years: the Reverends McCrary and Richardson, Walter Settles, and, in 2000, the ever-cherubic James Hill. “I’ve Got Heaven On My Mind”, a lilting track on Freeman’s new album, opens with the bass man calling out this roll, begging the question of the Fairfields’ future and, with it, the group’s legacy as the pre-eminent exponent of a style of black harmony singing that dates back to the 1800s.
“We’ve got Joseph Rice, and since James passed, we replaced him with a boy named Jay Fizer,” Freeman says, running down the current Fairfield lineup. “He’s singin’ the baritone part. Then you know Litt Waters and Robert [Hamlett].
“Still, I can’t go as much as I want to because I’m tryin’ to evade the nursing home on account of my wife,” Freeman continues, referring to his need to curtail the group’s bookings so he can stay home and care for his wife, who is in failing health. “So some of ’em I turn down, and some of ’em I take. We’re now singin’ maybe just once or twice a month. I told ’em that’d be enough for me, and not only me, but for the rest of the guys too.” (All of the group’s members but Rice are retired or up in years.)
Freeman is quick to add that the Fairfields have, nevertheless, made a commitment to God to continue singing as long as they are able. Not only that, but as his new solo album attests, whether crooning about visions of glory or reciting a cautionary tale like “The Liar”, he’s still in exquisite voice.
“I’ve worked with a lot of singers over the years but never anyone in Isaac’s category,” says Kieran Kane. “To me, he’s got a voice, like Frank Sinatra or Aretha Franklin, that’s just so identifiable and so strong and so powerful. And just dead on all the time. He never falters; he’s just so good at what he does. I don’t anticipate working with anyone of Isaac’s magnitude again.”
“I look at Dickie as one of the last men standing with maybe one of the roundest, most profound bass voices I’ve ever heard,” says Jerry Zolten. “And what a journey he has had to have lived to get to this point, and there he is in all his glory.
“I didn’t really begin to get a sense for how valued or treasured Dick was until I started to meet other people in gospel, fellow performers especially, but also older fans that would come out,” Zolten adds. “People like Ira Tucker, the lead singer of the Dixie Hummingbirds, would tell me Freeman was one of the best. And Billy Shelton, of the doo-wop group the Spaniels [‘Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight’, ‘Great Googley Moo’], told me there were just two bass singers he and his buddies held in awe when they were coming up, the legendary Jimmy Ricks and Dickie Freeman. But because Ricks was secular, he was famous, while Freeman was just known within that closed circle of gospel music.”
As for fame, Freeman says, “I still believe in the way I was born and reared. I never wanted to sing anything but gospel.”
And as for the astounding effect his voice has on seemingly everyone who hears it: “I don’t think it’s nothin’ that I’m doin’. I mean, I’m not givin’ myself the credit. I think the credit should go to God. He gave me whatever I got, you understand. It’s just a gift from God, a certain spiritual feeling that you get. That’s what I think it is. So I don’t know, other than what I just told you.”
ND contributing editor Bill Friskics-Warren lives in Nashville, where, besides writing a regular column for the Nashville Scene, he contributes to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Oxford American.
