Q: Ace, I recently read on George Loper’s website that a man named Uriah J. Fields had been asked to leave City Market for singing too loudly. Loper’s website mentioned that this man often sings on other, political “occasions.” Could you offer me a bit more information about the City Market incident, but perhaps more importantly, who is this man?—Old Man River
A: Uriah J. Fields, or “U.J.” as he is known, is Charlottesville’s very own Paul Robeson, and has been singing his political concerns up and down the Downtown Mall (and further afield) for years. As you noted, the City Market incident was first mentioned on the website of local media archivist and editor, George Loper, (http://george.loper.org). On hearing about a situation involving “an African-American man with a beard” being removed from City Market for “exercising his freedom of speech on Saturday, May 29,” Loper thought of Fields. Fields confirmed Loper’s suspicions and elucidated further in an e-mail that Loper then posted.
In short, Fields, who calls himself a “troubadour“ and says that he “makes music whenever the spirit moves him,” is a longtime civil rights activist. While Fields saw his program of such classics as “The Star Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful” as “paying tribute to the soldiers who gave so much to preserve the American way of life,” City Market vendors apparently felt that too many “amber waves of grain” struck a discordant note amid the conventional City Market hum of handwoven baskets and exotically flavored cream cheese.
According to Fields, he was escorted from City Market by the police. However, according to Police Chief Timothy Longo, Fields “wasn’t forcibly removed from the market” and the police officers “only wanted to preserve the peace” while recognizing that Fields “certainly has a Constitutional right to free speech.” In addition, City spokesperson Maurice Jones expresses clearly on Loper’s website that Fields is still welcome at City Market.
While Fields remains mysterious about his past, saying, “The past tends to be a hitching post and not a sign post [in that] a hitching post keeps you in one place instead of moving on with things,” Ace’s sleuthing found that the spirit has taken Fields from serving as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s secretary during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 (about which Fields later wrote a book, Inside the Montgomery Bus Boycott) to fighting in the battlefields of the Korean War.
There’s no denying that Fields is an original. As he says, “I guess there are some singers that prefer singing alone—Paul Robeson, Pavarotti—some us with strange voices don’t like to feel incumbent on the other folks.” And he tells Ace he’ll keep singing whenever and wherever he feels like it, cream cheese vendors be damned.