Isaac Freeman – Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around
Singing was just about all there was to do when Freeman was coming up as an only child in Johns, Alabama, a small coal mining camp 24 miles southwest of Birmingham, during the 1930s and ’40s. After his mother died, of complications related to high blood pressure, Isaac went to live with his grandmother and cousins (his father “strayed away” shortly after he was born). There wasn’t much for a young boy to do, he says, but go to school and, in the afternoon, do chores and play with the kids from the neighborhood.
And go to church, which couldn’t have been more important to Freeman’s grandmother, a fixture at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Johns. “I had to go to church every Sunday,” Freeman explains. “Matter of fact, every time they had those church doors open, those grandparents, they had you goin’ to church.”
Before she died, Freeman’s mother used to sing solos at Bethlehem Baptist, and would often bring her son up to the front of the sanctuary to join her. Soon Freeman and some other boys from the neighborhood were singing harmonies together, eventually assembling their own quartets, pick-up groups in which Isaac invariably sang lead.
That young boys would put together these ad hoc quartets, just as they would convene sandlot ball teams, was hardly surprising. At the time, the area around Birmingham, and especially nearby Bessemer, just 12 miles northeast of Johns, was a hotbed of black gospel, particularly the style of a cappella harmony singing later made famous by the Fairfield Four.
In Zolten’s estimation, this proliferation of Alabama gospel quartets in late ’20s and ’30s was due to “a combination of the right group of people in the right place at the right time, with the addition of media: the invention of phonograph records.” Record companies had begun documenting and disseminating what had hitherto been exclusively regional pockets of music.
“For whatever cultural reasons,” Zolten says, “groups like the Famous Blue Jay Singers, with lead singer Silas Steele [and, at one point, Jimmy Ricks on bass], got themselves a record contract on Victor. So suddenly there’s this vocal group from Alabama being heard all over the country. That did a couple things. It brought the Alabama style [of gospel harmonizing] to African-American singers around the nation. And, back home, it made the young singers want to do that, because these guys were famous like no other gospel singers had been famous before.”
Most of those pioneering quartets would appear on the Sunday night programs Freeman would attend at Bethlehem Baptist, including the Famous Blue Jays. The one quartet that really turned his head, however, was Birmingham’s Heavenly Gospel Singers, and their bass man, Porterfield Lewis.
“After hearin’ him on the program one Sunday night, I didn’t think about nothin’ but bein’ a bass singer,” Freeman says. “Of course, at the time, I was still singin’ lead in this little boy group that we had. But that was it for me. I knew then and there that I had to change over and start singin’ bass.”
Freeman didn’t begin singing professionally until after his grandmother died and he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, with his aunt in 1946; he was 17 or so at the time. “I heard a group singin’ across the alley one night, so I said to my auntie, ‘Mind if I go check ’em out?’ And she said, ‘No, go ahead. They might want you to join ’em.’
“So I went over and knocked on the door and introduced myself. I said, ‘Hey man, my name’s Isaac Freeman. Now look here, I’m originally from Alabama but I’ve been here for two or three weeks and I try to sing a little bit myself. I just wanted to come over and listen to your rehearsal.’
“So they let me come in and I sat there and listened for awhile. Then they started singin’ a song and I started hummin’, and one of ’em said, ‘Hey man, you got a good voice.’ At the time, this particular group — they called themselves the Golden Tones — didn’t have a bass singer. So later on their manager came down to the house and invited me to start singin’ with ’em.”
Freeman sang bass with the Golden Tones for about a year, after which he moved to the Kings of Harmony, an extremely influential quartet out of Baltimore, Maryland. The group cut only a couple of sides in its day but toured extensively on the East Coast and throughout the South during the ’30s and ’40s. Their bass singer had quit shortly before they hit Cleveland in ’47, and after learning that the Golden Tones had “a young boy who could really sing him some bass,” the manager of the Kings of Harmony came calling to see if Freeman was interested in filling the vacancy.
“I wasn’t exactly equipped to travel,” Freeman admits. “I didn’t have the clothes or the money, so I said, ‘Man I wouldn’t mind doin’ that, but I don’t have the finances to travel.’ But they said, ‘Don’t worry about no finances.’
“Now at that time I did have a job. But it wasn’t too good, so I thought maybe I could do better and decided to go on the road with these guys.”