The album contained five top forty pop and R&B singles, including a version of a spiritual called “Amen,” which my father reimagined with Johnny Pate as a triumphant march. He’d decided to cover the song after he heard Sidney Poitier sing it in the 1963 film Lilies of the Field. Johnny came up with the idea to open with an allusion to the old Negro spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and he also suggested the marching beat groove. The song hit number seven on the pop chart and provided Dad with his fourth number-one R&B hit within one year.
His seemingly endless string of hits continued with a catchy song called “You Must Believe Me” and two B-sides that also charted. The first of the B-sides, an epic, haunting ballad called “I’ve Been Trying,” showcased my father’s increasing finesse as a songwriter and highlighted the inherent rhythm in his guitar playing. It was also a perfection of the falsetto vocal style the Impressions had begun working on after the Brooks brothers left. As Johnny said, “On the end of ‘I’ve Been Trying,’ the group went into some high falsetto harmonic things that was really unheard of. Nobody had really done that. After Curtis and the guys did that, we just kind of flipped over it, the way it came out. A few sessions down the line, Curtis came up with a tune called ‘I Need You,’ and they did it again. This began to be a signature thing for the Impressions.”
The second charting B-side, “Long Long Winter,” made a further argument for Curtis as one of the great guitar players and songwriters of his era. Bob Marley and the Wailers would soon cover it as well as the album’s closing track, “I Made a Mistake.”
“Keep On Pushing” helped take the movement further into the mainstream just as Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in July 1964. The act outlawed discrimination against “racial, ethnic, national, and religious minorities, and women,” and ended “unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace, and by facilities that serve the general public.” When President Johnson signed it into law, Negroes breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed Kennedy’s successor would be a friend—or at least not an outright enemy. With the act in place, hope within the movement reached its pinnacle.
At the same time, my father experienced two great losses. On June 28, Kirby died of an enlarged heart. Only eighteen years old, he lived his entire life with severe mental disabilities. Even Mannish showed up at the funeral, where Uncle Kenny recalls seeing his father for the first time since he left.
As my father mourned Kirby and toured Keep On Pushing, he decided to leave Helen. His relationship with Diane had only deepened, and he yearned to pursue the woman in his heart. After his mother wrote him a letter that no longer survives, he wrote back from New York on November 14, 1964. His writing seems at times stilted and too formal, perhaps trying to make up for his lack of schooling, but his reply shows a tenderness and maturity uncommon for someone so young:
Dear Mother,
Here’s hoping that you are doing well. I did receive your letter and have read it several times as you have asked. Of course your letter is nothing new to me for all you have said has been in my mind for a great length of time before my love son was born, in which I think has been time enough to consider carefully your letter. Despite of my success in the business world, I must submit to being young, therefore I am considered under rank as you might say. But how old must I be to know my own mind? Or realize what is best for myself, my wife, and my beloved son? I am sure there is no doubt in your mind of my loving our Curt Curt. Might I live with him or away from him, I know I would be a better father to him than some with their sons, and yet I know this is not enough, for it does take two in most cases to give a child the teaching and guidance he needs. We both agree.
I have now been married over three years. I am sorry to say that I’ve been unhappy a large portion of this time. My wife is a good woman, I need not tell you this despite of her ways. And yet things have happened within our home that has caused my love for her to die. For over a year because of our child to come I have tried and failed in arousing my love for her. Mother, I am not one to pretend I do not love my wife, which I have told her, and my respect for her will not let me lead her on as I have in the past. A woman with a child needs more than a husband. She also needs love and affection, in which now only my son receives because of the lost feeling for my mate. Maybe you say Curt Curt’s a child and don’t know the difference, so resolve in some more constructive way, as thousands do … But Curt Curt is not enough. I do not believe an unhappy marriage helps a child or children in any way. Children are people with their own minds. Sooner or later, anything concealed from him will come out. Living with him or away shall amount to the same problems he’ll have to face. I am not so worried about Curt Curt, for if he’s anything like his daddy, he’ll have a mind of his own.
I can still respect my father as a man, and so can you. Would you rather live with him and he not love you? You did this with Al [Jackson] and what came of it? It only brought bitterness and unhappiness of yourself and your children toward a man who didn’t love you. You asked the question, “Would I deliberately condemn my baby son of the same misfortune?” Our only misfortune was being poor. I imagine it was harder on you of not having a husband than our not having a father. I love my son and respect his mother, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for the both of them. It is not my intention to say, “The Hell with it, shucking my responsibilities for some corner of the Earth.” I think I have proved myself to you and my family. But I must be happy too if it means giving up everything I have. Call it selfish interest if you must. But I don’t think it will deprive the little one of anything. I could not pretend to him that all is well when it is not.
Always your son,
Curt
Despite the losses, my father’s life had taken several dramatic turns for the better during 1964. Keep on Pushing and his work at OKeh made him successful and rich beyond his hopes, and his new relationship with Diane lessened the sting of his failed marriage. He couldn’t marry Diane since he hadn’t divorced Helen—she wanted money as part of a settlement, and my father never liked parting with money. Regardless, like Annie Bell did with Wal, my mother changed her name to Mayfield, making Tracy a Mayfield too.
No one told Tracy that Curtis wasn’t his biological father, echoing the situation between Judy and Annie Bell. He had to figure it out later in life. But, as Tracy recalls, Dad welcomed him as his own flesh and blood. “On his part, I didn’t feel any iota of a difference,” Tracy says. “He never once made me feel less than or different at all. When I looked at his face, I saw my father’s face. When I heard his voice, I heard my father’s voice.”
After leaving Helen, Dad moved into a posh apartment in the Marina Towers, one of Chicago’s most recognizable landmarks. The building looks like a multitiered spaceship, and he lived near the top of that spaceship, on the highest floor but one. From the windows, he could look down over the well-heeled theater district like a king observing his domain. The building stands less than two miles southeast of Cabrini, but it was a long way from the ghetto. The control he’d chased all his life seemed within his grasp, at least for the moment.
Dad enjoyed earning enough to carve out a place for himself and his family in a stuffy, upper-class white area. His elevation in social status was still new to him, though. He had the money, but not the manners. “He had poor table manners,” my mother recalls. “We were somewhere and he was eating some ribs, and he was licking his fingers. Oh, that just turned me off. I was like, ‘Curtis, can you just use your napkin?’”
Though he lived in a wealthy circle, his friends, family, and acquaintances still struggled with the same old poverty and hardships. He made sure to include them in his new wealth whenever possible, but the fact remained that he now straddled two worlds—the old world of the White Eagle, Cabrini-Green, and never having enough of anything, and the new one of fame, fortune, and excess.
My mother never felt comfortable in that new world. She says of Marina Towers,
“The building basically was white people who had money, and you got a doorman. Nobody ever said anything, but maybe that was my insecurity, being a little girl from Harlem in this building with all these people who probably had a lot of money.”
Aunt Ann felt uncomfortable there too. One day she came by but arrived while my parents were out. When they finally came back, Ann sat by their door waiting. She told them the doorman recognized her and let her up, and their white next-door neighbor saw her and invited her inside to wait, but she preferred to wait outside. The white residents of the building weren’t hostile, but it was simply too hard coming from the slums to feel safe and comfortable in upper-class white America. The danger was real, as my mother learned on a trip to Cicero, the neighborhood that destroyed an entire building in 1951 when a Negro family moved there. “They called us names, and it scared me, and I turned around and went home,” she says. “I didn’t ever go back.”
Though she didn’t feel comfortable in the plush apartment, my mother felt more at home with Dad’s family. On a visit to Grandma Sadie’s house in Cabrini, she picked up some tips on how to make her greens better. She also cultivated close relationships with Marion and Annie Bell.
As the year wound down, everything seemed to be moving in the right direction for Dad. He had just experienced the most successful year of his life. He could even relax slightly when touring the South. Driving through Mississippi earlier in the year, the Impressions pulled to the side of the road, exhausted. They knew they couldn’t stay there, but they couldn’t drive on without risking falling asleep at the wheel. Stuck in a bind, Dad decided to go to a nearby Holiday Inn and see if they’d give him a room. Fred and Sam waited nervously outside as he entered the building and approached the clerk. A few minutes later he appeared again, a grin pasted on his face. He waved them inside. They’d stay at Holiday Inns exclusively for the next several years.
Life had never been so good. Then, two weeks before Christmas, Sam Cooke was brutally murdered under circumstances that remain mysterious. After so many dizzying highs, Curtis greeted 1965 mourning both his brother and his hero.
It was a harbinger of things to come.
6
People Get Ready
“What has happened, what has caused this to be?
Have I become insane or is this true reality?”
—“I’VE FOUND THAT I’VE LOST”
February 21, 1965, Audubon Ballroom, Manhattan—Malcolm X knew the men who came to kill him. Standing before a large crowd of Negro Muslims, he prepared to give his remarks on his new Organization of Afro-American Unity. Before he could start, a man walked to the stage, raised a sawed-off shotgun concealed under his coat, and pulled the trigger. On cue, two other men stood up and emptied handguns into Malcolm’s body.
The months leading to Malcolm X’s assassination marked the most intense and fractious period since the movement had begun. As his biographer Manning Marable wrote, “The fragile unity that had made possible the great efforts in Montgomery and Birmingham was showing signs of strain. The arguments between so-called radicals like John Lewis and more mainstream black leaders like King and Ralph Abernathy had not abated, and as long-desired goals finally came within sight, they had the peculiar effect of further splintering the movement.”
Watching the movement unravel around him, Dad found solace, as always, in his guitar. In what he called “a deep mood, a spiritual state of mind,” he put together the follow-up to “Keep On Pushing.” He showed the song—a breathtaking ballad called “People Get Ready”—to Johnny in his normal way. “Curtis would usually bring me the material on a cassette tape,” Johnny said. “When he brought me the songs, it was nothing but guitar and voice. Generally, with Curtis, he would have no idea what the arrangement was going to sound like until we got to the session. We never had the opportunity to sit down and work out an arrangement together. He would bring me the basic tape, and at that point, he’d get back with Fred and Sam, they would work out the harmonies, and then we would hit the studio.”
Fred and Sam learned the song, but before hitting the studio, they had a run of shows with the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, and the Marvelettes. At the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, they gave the audience a tantalizing hint of what was to come.
During the show, they got into a singing battle with the Temptations. Fred recalled, “The Temptations went out and did one of our songs, ‘Gypsy Woman.’ So when it was time for us to go on, we went out and did one of their songs, ‘The Girl’s Alright with Me.’ And then, it was on. We would do a song; they would do a song. The host of the show was Georgie Woods, and he just let us go at it.”
After the third or fourth encore, the Impressions stood backstage caught in a bind. They’d run out of songs, but the audience screamed for more. My father said, “Well, we got ‘People Get Ready.’” Sam nervously spoke up: “Are you sure we can do this song? We just learned it.” My father replied in his customary seat-of-the-pants way, “Sure, let’s give it a try.” They returned onstage to a chorus of cheers, and Dad plucked the opening chords. “You could almost hear a pin drop in there,” Sam said. “It was so soulful, man, it just knocked these people out.”
It knocked Johnny out, too. “The song touched me quite a bit,” he said. “I listened to the lyrics, I listened to the melody, and I thought, ‘This could be a big, big song,’ because of the message that was involved, for one thing, and because of the way Curtis was delivering it. You could tell he was bringing something really that he felt.” They cut it immediately after the tour ended, and ABC released the single just after Malcolm’s assassination.
“People Get Ready” plays like a meditation, a hymn, a love letter to the fathomless strength and endless struggle of Negroes in America. It opens with a haunting, hummed melody that sends chills up the spine. Johnny’s arrangement is masterful—pizzicato strings and lilting violin lines weaving around plinking chimes. Once Curtis begins singing, it is clear he’d found a way to merge the movement’s vast hope with the fierce sadness and pain Negroes experienced trying to make that hope a reality.
My father intended “People Get Ready” to reach far back in history, even as it kept an eye on the future. His lyrics brought the coded messages of old Negro spirituals into the turbulent ’60s. When he sang about a train to Jordan, everyone fighting for their rights in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia knew what he meant. Everyone who had migrated to Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and California knew it too.
It was the same train that formed the Underground Railroad during slavery; it was the train that brought Annie Bell and millions like her to northern cities during the Great Migration; it was the movement train my father’s generation boarded, determined to get to a better place or die trying.
Like “Keep On Pushing,” the song had heavy gospel roots. “Lyrically you could tell it’s from parts of the Bible,” Dad said.
“There’s no room for the hopeless sinner who would hurt all mankind just to save his own / Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner, for there’s no hiding place against the kingdom’s throne.” It’s an ideal. There’s a message there. I couldn’t help myself for it. And it was also my own teachings, me talking to myself about my own moral standards. As a kid, sometimes you have nobody to turn to. I could always go back to some of the sermons and talk to myself in a righteous way. I had heard preachers speak of how there is “no hiding place.” If you’ve been around enough preachers, you’ll see how their words are in the song in one form or another. I wanted to bring a little gospel into the drive for reality with the song, and it also lent a pride to those who were oppressed and trying to define themselves on another level.
Annie Bell left her imprint on his music once again, evoking his most powerful poetry yet. In a way, he sang directly to her as she boarded the Panama Limited with Mannish and Mercedes almost forty years before:
People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’
&nbs
p; You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin’
Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord
So people get ready for the train to Jordan
Picking up passengers coast to coast
Faith is the key, open the doors and board ’em
There’s hope for all among those loved the most.
The single shot to number three R&B and number fourteen pop, and the album hit the top spot on the R&B album chart. It was the only Impressions album to rise that high, and the song remains one of their most famous and recognizable works. After “People Get Ready,” my father became the foremost social commentator in pop music. He now understood that the songs of his that contained conviction—dripped with it, actually—tended to be ones that were about something.
Music had given Dad power to fight and sometimes defeat the personal challenges that haunted him. He now saw music as a way to combat another source of powerlessness in his life—being a Negro in America. Only this time, everyone could benefit from his fight.
Songs like “People Get Ready” and “Keep On Pushing” didn’t come from his head whole cloth, though. Rather, they were works of journalism, expressing the thoughts, feelings, and actions of his community in a way the evening news never could. “I was observing things, what happened politically, what was in the paper, what was on television,” he said. “Asking what things were wrong that oughta be right.”
Traveling Soul Page 13
