Curtis Mayfield

Chicago

Curtis Mayfield was born in Chicago on 3 June 1942 and grew up in public housing, settling in Cabrini-Green in his teens. His mother taught him piano, and he taught himself guitar, tuning it to the black keys of the piano. That open F-sharp tuning stayed with him for his whole career, and he sang mostly in falsetto. In 1956 he joined Jerry Butler's group the Roosters, which became the Impressions two years later.

When Butler left, Mayfield became the group's lead singer. He wrote Gypsy Woman, Keep On Pushing, People Get Ready in 1965 and We're a Winner in 1967. Keep On Pushing became an anthem for Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. In 1968 he formed his own label, Curtom Records, in Chicago.

Going solo

Mayfield left the Impressions in 1970. According to the biography Traveling Soul, by his son Todd Mayfield and Travis Atria, the reasons were artistic as well as financial: alone he could be funkier and freer. His first solo album, Curtis, came out in September 1970 and spent five nonconsecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard black albums chart. It held Move On Up, which became his best-known song. Roots followed in October 1971. Mayfield and his band were also recorded live at the Bitter End in New York in 1971, and on television in Bremen in January 1972.

Super Fly

His soundtrack for Gordon Parks Jr.'s film Super Fly began when Parks asked Mayfield and his band to appear in a nightclub scene. Mayfield disliked what he saw on screen, calling it a cocaine infomercial, and wrote songs that comment on the story and its characters. Super Fly came out on 11 July 1972, three weeks before the film. Mayfield told Rolling Stone in 1973 that he had not needed to leave his neighborhood to be surrounded by the things the film is about, and the lyrics were written as a commentary on the story. It reached number one on the Billboard Top 200 and outsold the film. Two singles, Freddie's Dead and Superfly, reached the Hot 100 top 10. The first song recorded for it was Pusherman.

The soundtrack work that followed included Claudine for Gladys Knight & the Pips, Let's Do It Again for the Staple Singers and Sparkle for Aretha Franklin. In between, Back to the World (1973) took up the return of soldiers from Vietnam.

America today

There's No Place Like America Today appeared on Curtom in May 1975. Its cover set a Margaret Bourke-White photograph of a line of black people queuing beneath a billboard advertising the American way. The music is slow and spare, from the shooting in Billy Jack to When Seasons Change. It reached number 120 on the Billboard 200 and number 13 on the soul chart. Writers have since called it underrated.

Later years

Mayfield moved to Atlanta and closed his recording operation in Chicago. In 1990 he recorded Superfly 1990 with Ice-T, for the film The Return of Superfly. On 13 August 1990, stage lighting equipment fell on him as he was being introduced at an outdoor concert at Wingate Field in Brooklyn, and he was paralyzed from the neck down. He kept writing and singing, and his last album, New World Order, appeared in 1996, recorded while he lay on his back, with vocals sometimes taken a line at a time.

He received the Grammy Legend Award in 1994 and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. He entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Impressions in 1991 and again as a solo artist in 1999. He died in Roswell, Georgia, on 26 December 1999, aged 57. In 2019 the Library of Congress chose Super Fly for the National Recording Registry. Beastie Boys, the Notorious B.I.G., Erykah Badu, Snoop Dogg and Eminem are among those who have sampled it.