Curtis Mayfield

Curtis Lee Mayfield was born on the third of June 1942 at Chicago, Illinois, the eldest of five children of Marion Washington and Kenneth Mayfield. His parents separated when he was five. He was raised by his mother and his grandmother Annie Bell Carrothers in the Cabrini-Green public-housing project on the near North Side of Chicago. He attended the Wells Community Academy High School through tenth grade and left in 1958 to perform with the gospel quartet The Northern Jubilee Gospel Singers.

He met Jerry Butler at the Northern Jubilee in 1956 and joined Butler's small post-Doo-Wop group The Roosters in 1958. The Roosters were renamed The Impressions in 1958 and recorded the 1958 Vee-Jay single "For Your Precious Love" with Butler as lead vocalist. The single reached number eleven on the Billboard Hot 100. Butler departed in early 1960; Mayfield took over the lead vocal of the Impressions and the principal songwriting.

He produced across the following eleven years the Impressions singles — "Gypsy Woman" (1961), "It's All Right" (1963), "Keep On Pushing" (1964), "People Get Ready" (1965), "We're a Winner" (1968), "Choice of Colors" (1969) — that constituted the principal social-conscience song-cycle of post-civil-rights soul music. The 1965 single "People Get Ready" was used by Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive) as the marching song of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march and remains the most widely-recorded soul song of the period.

He left the Impressions in 1970 to begin a solo career on his own Curtom Records label — making him the second Black artist after Sam Cooke (placed in this archive) to own his own substantial record label. He produced across the following decade the solo albums Curtis (1970), Roots (1971), and the August 1972 soundtrack to the Gordon Parks Jr. film Super Fly — the album that occupied the Billboard 200 for forty-six weeks and that is regularly identified as one of the principal soundtracks of twentieth-century American film. The 1972 single "Freddie's Dead" reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and established a new commercial high point for the social-conscience soul tradition.

He was paralysed from the neck down on the thirteenth of August 1990 when a lighting rig fell on him during a concert at the Wingate Field at Brooklyn. He continued to compose and record from his wheelchair until shortly before his death. The 1996 album New World Order — composed and recorded in two-and-three-line bursts when his diaphragm could sustain the air — is widely identified as one of the great recordings of his career.

He died of complications of his injuries at North Atlanta on the twenty-sixth of December 1999, at fifty-seven.

He is honored here as the social-conscience voice of soul.