The suitably named soul legend Lee Fields is coming to Leeside Friday 17th January to perform at one of Cork’s wonderfully unique venues, Live at St. Luke’s.
Soul music pours out of Lee Fields, as free and unstinting as God's love. It has ever since the 1960s, when he was a teenager in North Carolina sweating it out on juke joint stages, crumpled dollars hailing at his feet. It continues now that the living legend is in his late sixties, ushering in the most successful and fruitful period of his career.
Like any living legend worth their salt, Fields has suffered despair, obscurity, and defeat. Although he now tours stages around the world, and although he helped fellow soul legends like Sharon Jones (who was once Fields' backup singer) and Charles Bradley (whom Fields took on his first tour) get their first break, he did not always have this position. There were years -- they were known as "the 1980s" -- when Fields nearly gave up. His success these days has a bittersweet tinge: His dear
friends Bradley and Jones have both passed, leaving Fields to outlive them and carry their legacy forth.
It Rains Love, his latest and possibly his most earnest record ever, is music of endless love, of endless hurt, of reverberating kindness and wisdom, of decades and lifetimes' worth of pain alchemized into kindness. His lyrics glow with an unearthly purity he has never allowed himself to touch before. He has never been a dictator, a la James Brown, but his longtime band the Expressions gave him free reign to do whatever he wanted. He ended up putting more of himself -- his eloquent, peculiar self -- into his music than he used to dare.
Only a true survivor could have made It Rains Love, and Fields is nothing if not that. Fields has been married to the same woman for 50 years. He lives in the same house. He is a man of deep and abiding faiths, and part of his bedrock comes from the moment in the 1980s, when his career seemed over. He had never gotten famous, and the gigs were drying up. It was time, he thought. There would be no more Lee Fields, "I thought I was done," he says of the era when the soul music revolution of the previous decade seemed to beat a hasty retreat under the lacquered assault of new synthesized equipment and stiff, early drum machine programming. "I had almost literally given up." He made other plans - he worked in real estate. He planned to open a restaurant. He settled into his role, not as Lee Fields, but as Elmer, the dependable and steadfast family man who underpinned his wild stage performer's alter ego. "My wife stopped me, man, she told me 'stick to what you know.'"
Today, he stands at the forefront of the soul revival, a bustling and ever-growing corner that has nourished the nutrient-starved waters of 21st century pop music with virtues it lacks: a sense of timelessness, of eternity, of a tradition extending backward into generations.
Fields' music doesn't belong to Now; it belongs to eternity. He has been testifying, in the purest sense of the word, since Otis Redding was alive. He is living history. See him take to the stage at the striking former church, Live at St Luke’s, Cork, Friday 17th January 2020. Tickets €26 + booking fee are available from uticket.ie
