Today I celebrate the memory of Curtis Lee Mayfield (3 June 1942 – 26 December 1999)..The first time I ever heard Mayfield and paid attention to him was in the 1961 “Impressions” song “Gypsy Woman”..it can not be overstated that you cannot judge the importance of a song or record release by how high it scores on the sales charts. But the real “tell” is how much the piece touched the public and influenced the culture. Mayfield began as a gospel singer in the group ” Northern Jubilee Gospel Singers” in Chicago. He was seven years old. Curtis got his first guitar when he was ten, he was fond of saying ” he loved his guitar so much he used to sleep with it” Curtis was a self taught guitar player and learned to play along with gospel and Doo-Wop records and was really influenced by Muddy Waters and Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia.. But the first big move for him was in high school when he joined his friend Jerry Butler’s group “The Roosters” Curtis began to write songs for them..and they became “The Impressions” two years later. When I was a teen who joined many others in my age group in the civil rights marches and demonstrations of the 60s it was often songs by the “The Impressions” that became our “fight songs” . Often I heard this music on a record player of one of the older activists in SNCC ( Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee ) before we heard them on the radio. Tunes like “Keep On Pushing,” “People Get Ready”, “It’s All Right” “We’re a Winner” “Move on Up”…These were the songs we listened to and sang as a whole generation of “kids” went off to war to fight “Jim Crow”..I like to say that Mayfield wrote the “soundtrack” to the civil rights movement. If all Curtis Mayfield ever did was that , it would make him a “giant” among American musicians and composers. But after Mayfield became a “solo” artist he became much more. With his historic political commentary music and movie soundtracks Curtis Mayfield pushed the envelope of using music to point the finger at oppression and repression , crime and “benign neglect”..pulling no punches in political commentary like no other American artist before or since. His driving anti-drug commentary in the soundtrack to the film “Super-Fly” broke new ground in innovative music, re-defining what we were calling “funk” music ..and adding east African and west African rhythms to the mix and blazing a new trail with each album. But Mayfield never strayed far from his roots in gospel and “love” songs Just listen to his songs like “We the people who are darker than Blue” or “The makings of You “..mixing those “sweet” lyrics with a powerful message in a way only Mayfield could do. And a whole soundtrack in the movie “Claudine” that was a tribute to “Black Love” in hard times in America. The soundtrack to the fictional musical ‘bio-pic” “Sparkle” dug into the roots of R&B music but remained fresh and innovative . The prison drama “Short Eyes” a soundtrack that took “funk” and blues to places they never went before. I could go on writing about Curtis Mayfield all day long……I WANT TO…but even though I have a big day ahead talking to people about the gun violence plague…I will from time to time go up to my office and post a song by Mayfield…the supply is generous…We won’t see another like Curtis…even in his last years when he was disabled after a tragic accident while getting ready for a show Curtis found a way to keep telling us about our world….a powerful talent.
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