Episode 124 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “People Get Ready", the Impressions, and the early career of Curtis Mayfield.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "I'm Henry VIII I Am" by Herman's Hermits.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/



Resources

As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist, with full versions of all the songs excerpted in this episode.

A lot of resources were used for this episode.

Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs by Guy and Candie Carawan is a combination oral history of the Civil Rights movement and songbook.

Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power by Aaron Cohen is a history of Chicago soul music and the way it intersected with politics.

Traveling Soul: The Life of Curtis Mayfield  by Todd Mayfield with Travis Atria is a biography of Mayfield by one of his sons, and rather better than one might expect given that.

Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul by Craig Werner looks at the parallels and divergences in the careers of its three titular soul stars.

This compilation has a decent selection of recordings Mayfield wrote and produced for other artists on OKeh in the early sixties.

This single-CD set of Jerry Butler recordings contains his Impressions recordings as well as several songs written or co-written by Mayfield.

This double-CD of Major Lance's recordings contains all the hits Mayfield wrote for him.

And this double-CD collection has all the Impressions' singles from 1961 through 1968.

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Transcript

A couple of episodes ago we had a look at one of the first classic protest songs of the soul genre. Today we're going to look at how Sam Cooke's baton was passed on to another generation of soul singer/songwriters, and at one of the greatest songwriters of that generation. We're going to look at the early career of Curtis Mayfield, and at "People Get Ready" by the Impressions:

[Excerpt: The Impressions, "People Get Ready"]

A quick note before I start this one -- there is no way in this episode of avoiding dealing with the fact that the Impressions' first hit with a Curtis Mayfield lead vocal has, in its title, a commonly used word for Romany people beginning with "g" that many of those people regard as a slur -- while others embrace the term for themselves. I've thought long and hard about how to deal with this, and the compromise I've come up with is that I will use excerpts from the song, which will contain that word, but I won't use the word myself. I'm not happy with that compromise, but it's the best I can do. It's unfortunate that that word turns up a *lot* in music in the period I'm covering -- it's basically impossible to avoid. Anyway, on with the show...

Curtis Mayfield is one of those musicians who this podcast will almost by definition underserve -- my current plan is to do a second episode on him, but if this was a thousand-song podcast he would have a *lot* more than just two episodes. He was one of the great musical forces of the sixties and seventies, and listeners to the Patreon bonus episodes will already have come across him several times before, as he was one of those musicians who becomes the centre of a whole musical scene, writing and producing for most of the other soul musicians to come out of Chicago in the late fifties and early 1960s.

Mayfield grew up in Chicago, in the kind of poverty that is, I hope, unimaginable to most of my listeners. He had to become "the man of the house" from age five, looking