Curtis Mayfield was one of the seminal vocalists and most talented guitarists of his era. But perhaps more important is his role as a social critic, and the vital influence his music had on the civil rights movement. “People Get Ready” is the black anthem of the 1960s, and on his soundtrack to the 1972 movie Super Fly, rather than glorifying the blaxploitation imagery of the film, Mayfield wrote and sang one of the most incisive audio portraits of black America on record.
In Traveling Soul, Todd Mayfield tells his famously private father’s story in riveting detail. Born into dire poverty, raised in the slums of Chicago, Curtis became a musical prodigy, not only singing like a dream but also growing into a brilliant songwriter. In the 1960s he became a pioneer, opening his own label and production company and working with many other top artists, including the Staple Singers. Curtis’s life was famously cut short by an accident that left him paralyzed, but in his declining health he received the long-awaited recognition of the music industry.
Passionate, illuminating, vivid, and absorbing, Traveling Soul will doubtlessly take its place among the classics of music biography.
Copyright © 2017 by Todd Mayfield
All rights reserved
Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-61373-679-1
This biography has not been authorized by the estate of Curtis Mayfield.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mayfield, Todd, author. | Atria, Travis, author.
Title: Traveling soul : the life of Curtis Mayfield / Todd Mayfield with Travis Atria.
Description: Chicago, IL : Chicago Review Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016027301 (print) | LCCN 2016028753 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613736791 (hardback) | ISBN 9781613736807 (PDF edition) | ISBN 9781613736821 (EPUB edition) | ISBN 9781613736814 (Kindle edition)
Subjects: LCSH: Mayfield, Curtis. | Singers—United States—Biography. | Soul musicians—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC ML420.M3369 M39 2016 (print) | LCC ML420.M3369 (ebook) | DDC 782.421644092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027301
A list of credits and copyright notices for the Curtis Mayfield songs quoted in this book can be found on page 318.
Interior design: Jonathan Hahn
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
To my parents, Curtis and Diane, and to my daughter and greatest inspiration, Corinne Lee Mayfield
Contents
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
1 THE REVEREND A. B. MAYFIELD
2 MY MAMA BORNED ME IN A GHETTO
3 TRAVELING SOULS
4 THE ORIGINAL IMPRESSIONS
5 KEEP ON PUSHING
6 PEOPLE GET READY
7 CURTOM
8 NOW YOU’RE GONE
9 MOVE ON UP
10 SUPER FLY
11 BACK TO THE WORLD
12 WHEN SEASONS CHANGE
13 NEVER SAY YOU CAN’T SURVIVE
LASTING IMPRESSIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SONG CREDITS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
First Impressions
“Try and understand I’m an unusual man.”
—“LOVE ME (RIGHT IN THE POCKET)”
Atlantic City, 1969—My father stalks around his dressing room. The Impressions are ready to hit the stage for their second set, but first he wants his money. He’s hip to this game; he takes no mess. He turned sixteen onstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and since then he’s seen every type of crook run every type of con. He knows getting paid after the show often means not getting paid. These days, he demands a percentage up front and the rest between sets, sliding the money into his vest pocket, where you’d have to go through him to get it.
The promoter in Atlantic City is a wiseguy, though. He slithers into the dressing room clutching cash in one hand, steel in the other. He levels the gun at my father’s head. “How bad do you want this money?” he demands.
Everyone freezes.
“I want it bad enough to let you pull that trigger.”
He says it coolly, his voice barely rising above the soft, measured sigh that has graced countless hit records.
The promoter lowers the gun. My father gets his money.
He strides on stage, the music kicks in, the crowd shouts in ecstasy, the Impressions finish with a flourish and walk straight out the front door of the auditorium to their cars, leaving the band playing inside. They gun their engines into the night toward the next show and the next promoter foolish enough to pull another stunt like that.
Curtis Mayfield has seen scarier things than a gun in his face. His father deserted him when he was five years old. He witnessed his mother abused and abandoned, powerless to help her. He spent long, hunger-wracked nights battling starvation in a squalid single-room apartment. He knows as much about pimps and prostitutes as he does about the Bible and Jesus. The first he learned from the rotten slums where he grew up a nothing child, destined to become another boyish, shiftless jigger. The second he learned from his grandmother’s church, where she practiced a cultish mixture of Christianity and the black arts called Spiritualism.
These experiences gave him the courage to stare down the barrel of a gun in Atlantic City without flinching. They made him who he is—a contradictory, unpredictable, brilliant man who dropped out of high school and built a musical empire. A man who spends much of his public life on stage and much of his private one locked in his bedroom. A man capable of legendary cool and flashes of temperamental violence. A man revered around the world but tormented by insecurity. A man gifted with tremendous powers of imagination but little ability to master the mundane day-to-day mechanics of life. A man who somehow manages to be both present and absent as a father. A man who sings of endless love but can’t remain faithful to any woman. A man hell-bent on control who sometimes relinquishes that control to the wrong people.
In becoming that man, he’s plucked the sweet fruits of the American Dream—money, fame, women—and choked down the despair of the American nightmare—degradation, deprivation, and humiliation because his skin was the wrong color. And the hardest part of his journey hasn’t even begun. Like everyone, he can’t see the future. As he speeds away from Atlantic City, he doesn’t know the greatest tragedy awaits him in the place he least expects it. He can’t foresee this tragedy will lead to his greatest triumph of spirit and a slow, agonizing death. He can scarcely imagine life will soon teach him the ultimate impossibility of control.
A few would-be biographers have tried to tell my father’s story; none have done it well. They failed because they had no access to his inner life, to what drove him. They had no knowledge of his deep insecurity over his dark skin, big teeth, and small stature; of the humiliation he suffered at the hands of schoolmates because of his family’s desperate poverty; of his profound need for control over music, money, and relationships; of his deeply divided nature as a Gemini. Even astrology agnostics would have to agree, if such a thing as a true Gemini exists, my father was one. Everyone who knew him affirms that he changed his mind so often and with such ease, they never knew exactly what he felt, what he wanted, or what he’d do. Only with music was he constant.
These writers also failed because they didn’t know where he came from. They didn’t spend time with the people who raised him, but those people are integral to his story. You most likely didn’t pick up this book to read about Curtis’s grandmother, but without her, he might never have become a musician, and he couldn’t have written songs such as
“Keep On Pushing” and “People Get Ready.” In interviews throughout his life, he always mentioned her as a main influence and inspiration. To understand him, then, you must understand her.
You most likely didn’t pick up this book to get a history lesson, either. But my father’s music was integral to the civil rights movement, which he lived through and helped mold even as it molded him. To understand him, you must understand his times. We’ll follow the movement as it flowers and flutters. Part of that movement concerns racial terminology and what it signified, so we’ll use the correct nomenclature of the times—from “Negro” in his childhood, to “black” by the late ’60s, to “African American” in the last two decades of his life.
Another issue of terminology arose while writing this book. Growing up with a famous father, I saw many sides of him. I called him different names depending on the situation—he was “Dad” at home; he was “my father” in public, around people who might have wanted something from us; he was “Curtis” later in life when I helped him run the Curtom label. Since I knew him as all three during his life, I will use all three throughout the book.
During his life, my father guarded his privacy jealously. After his death, we have done the same with his legacy. But the world deserves to know the real Curtis Mayfield. A wise man once said, “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.” Perhaps we don’t have to choose. Maybe it’s possible to show my father his due respect by the very act of telling the truth, just like he did in his songs. He told more truth than any musician of his era, capturing the hope, fury, despair, strength, and love of his people in a way no one else could. As Rolling Stone said of him, “More than Marvin Gaye, more than Stevie Wonder, maybe even more than James Brown, Curtis Mayfield captured the total black experience in America during the ’60s.” Of course, his music wasn’t just for black people—scores of fans from every race and ethnicity can attest to that—but it was from our perspective. As he said in his legendary concert at the Bitter End, he was always “believing very strongly in equality for all, but basically telling it like it is.”
In presenting his story through my eyes, I have tried to tell it like it is and like it was, even when a crafted piece of public relations would have made him look better. After all, as the man himself once sang:
Pardon me, brother, while you stand in your glory,
I know you won’t mind if I tell the whole story.
1
The Reverend A. B. Mayfield
“People get ready, there’s a train a-coming
You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board.”
—“PEOPLE GET READY”
Mansfield, Louisiana, circa 1910—Slavery was dead, but its terror still hung in the hot air over the cotton fields near my great-grandmother’s house. The crack of the master’s whip echoed through the generations of her family up to her own grandparents, who as slaves were worth almost $800 on the trading block in their prime. After suffering in bondage so long, they couldn’t help but feel their current freedom was negotiable.
Like much about my great-grandmother’s birth, a cloud surrounds her real name. She sometimes introduced herself as Gertrude, while others knew her as Annabelle, but most likely she went by Annie Bell. Such confusion about names occurred often in the land of slavery. Negroes could never know their true last names, and even first names could carry the indelible imprint of the plantation. For almost two centuries, they traded in nicknames and pseudonyms, perhaps as a way to assume control of their identity in a world that gave them none.
Annie Bell’s father, Elmore Scott, toiled at a sawmill—a comparative luxury. He earned enough money to let his wife, Lula, stay home—another luxury, although she had to pick up jobs on the side with her old Singer sewing machine. Their hometown of Mansfield was a tiny, stifling place occupying less than four square miles of land. Cotton took to the black, fecund topsoil there, and its downy tufts had formed the backbone of the economy since slavery times. By Annie Bell’s birth, most Mansfield Negroes had become sharecroppers—a kind of virtual slavery that kept them in perpetual debt, eking out an existence on the knife-edge of starvation. Still, Elmore and Lula hoped their daughter might have a better chance at life than they did, just as they once had a better chance than their parents. They also knew how nominal the definition of “better” could be.
Lula kept her little house spotless, decorating the inside with a three-foot-tall porcelain collie. Out back, she tilled a garden, showering special adoration on her elephant leaves and four-o’clocks. Annie Bell loved exploring the enchanting garden in the afternoon when the four-o’clocks would open as if by some magic, right on time. The house had running water but no bathroom, so Annie Bell, born severely nearsighted, trudged cautiously through the chicken yard rain or shine to reach the dilapidated outhouse. Sundays Lula took the family to a country church where the preacher sweated and moaned, conjuring the Spirit from thin air. The church provided the only true sanctuary for her family, as it did for Negroes across the South. Within its sacred walls, they had the freedom to drop their defenses and spill out their troubles like vessels filled to the brim. As Annie Bell grew, these gospel-drenched sounds became part of her flesh and blood and bone.
While Elmore and Lula struggled to raise her the best they knew how, Jim Crow drew lines around them they couldn’t control. They couldn’t always see those lines, so Annie Bell had to learn to sense where they stood. If not, she could meet her demise at the hands of the lynch mob, the South’s most gruesome death sentence. During Annie Bell’s childhood, Louisiana citizens lynched a Negro once every four months, by a conservative estimate. It served as a grim warning of what happened when you didn’t know your place.
Jim Crow laws in Louisiana reinforced that message at every turn. Under those laws, Annie Bell couldn’t ride the same streetcars as whites, drink or buy alcohol from the same taverns as whites, or build a house in a white neighborhood. It was illegal for her to marry a white man, buy tickets for public events at the same window, occupy the same jails, attend the same schools, or rent in the same buildings as white people.
As awful as segregation was, better days beckoned like unfulfilled promises. In 1909, the scholar W. E. B. DuBois helped form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which would soon set in motion the legal death of segregation. The NAACP took most of its membership from the Negro middle class, so Annie Bell and her family in Louisiana didn’t know much about it at the time. Soon, though, it would cause significant improvements to Negro life throughout the country, hers included.
By confronting the power structure, the NAACP created niches for more radical groups like Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and planted the seeds for the great civil rights movement that would begin three decades later. Unlike the NAACP, Garvey recruited poor, working class, and rural Negroes. As Annie Bell neared her teenage years, she might very well have heard of Garvey and his exhortation “Up, you mighty race! You can accomplish what you will.”
The event that affected her most personally, though, was the first Great War. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, Negroes began slipping out of the South to the promised land north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but when America entered World War I in 1917, the trickle burst into a flood historians call the Great Migration. Over the course of six decades, six million Negroes, my great-grandmother among them, left the South and spread across the country in search of anything better.
Annie Bell’s father might have considered fleeing as the exodus began around him, but the South was all he knew. He stayed in Mansfield with his family while many of his friends harked to the siren song of northern factories, sometimes only taking the clothes on their backs for fear their white bosses might find out what they were up to and stop them—or worse.
Weaker ties bound Annie Bell to Louisiana, and while the war thundered on, major changes in her life pushed her closer to leaving. First, she found Spiritualism, a belief system
that didn’t square with her mother’s Christianity. Spiritualists believe they can communicate with the dead through a medium. The movement started in the late 1840s, when a woman in a New York farmhouse claimed she communicated with the spirit of a man who was murdered there years before. After that, it mushroomed but faded almost as quickly once most of the Spiritualist seers proved to be simple hucksters. It gained steam again during World War I, when Annie Bell found it.
Though Lula wanted no part of the strange quasi-religion, Spiritualism fit naturally in Louisiana, especially around New Orleans, where African voodoo still suffused the culture like incense. Slaves had carried voodoo within their bones across the horrors of the Middle Passage and never exactly let it go, even though their masters on a new continent tried to beat it out of them. Once in America, it mixed with a dab of Christianity and became something different. Annie Bell drank deeply from this mixture of African religion and American experience, and soon she claimed to have a spirit guide, a dead person she could talk to and see.
At the same time, she found romance. In the early 1920s, she met Willie Cooper, and soon they married. In 1923, just barely a teenager herself, Annie Bell gave birth to a girl she named Mercedes. The next year, she had a boy named Curtis Lee, whom everyone called Mannish because he exhibited some of the less flattering aspects of manhood from an early age. Soon after Mannish’s birth, Annie Bell and Willie split.
As she raised her children under the Louisiana sun, the exodus continued around her. With her hometown becoming ever more stifling, my great-grandmother contemplated her options. She had grown into a storm of a woman with a thunderous temper, which could only mean trouble in Louisiana. Even if she managed to survive Jim Crow, she knew it would put a permanent lid on her children’s dreams. As great hordes of people fled north, sometimes returning to visit with the trappings of modest wealth, it seemed her best hope rested on a train chugging away from home. Sometime in 1928 she made up her mind. Annie Bell said good-bye to her family and the only world she’d ever known, bundled Mannish and Mercedes up tight, and plunged into the Great Migration.
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