Icon: Curtis Mayfield
Few musicians deserve the word “icon” the way Curtis Mayfield did. He was one of R&B’s self-contained giants: co-founder of Curtom Records in 1968, the most skillful politically and socially-oriented songwriter of the late ’60s and early ’70s (as well as a romantic bard of the first order), a sweet and supple falsetto vocalist, and one of the most influential guitarists in all of soul and funk. He was the driving force behind the Impressions, one of the great ’60s soul groups, a solo giant beginning in 1970 and an excellent composer for others – Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, the Staple Singers. His Impressions work impacted hard on Jamaican R&B – there’s basically no rock steady without Mayfield – and he owned the ’70s black film soundtrack. And no one is more was responsible for putting Chicago R&B on the map: tough and tender, urbane and down-home, emotional and analytical. These five albums cover 1968 to 1972, Mayfield’s most intense creative period.
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This 1968 album was the first release on Curtom Records, the label founded by Impressions singer/songwriter/guitarist Curtis Mayfield and manager Eddie Thomas. And while the lead song, "They Don't Know," and the concluding title track ("Too many have died in protecting my pride/For me to go second class/We've survived a hard blow and I want you to know/That you'll face us at last") are among Mayfield's most pointedly political songs, much of This Is My Country is about love; the lead-off track, "They Don't Know," is about both. Mayfield wasn't above rewriting his peers ("Gone Away" is heavily reminiscent of Smokey Robinson's "My Girl Has Gone," from three years earlier), but he could make even simple romantic worry sound unsettlingly huge, as on the rumbling chorus of "You Want Somebody Else."
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This 1970 album, Curtis Mayfield's last with the Impressions, is a transitional work: you can hear the rhythms shift between the elegant soul that marked prior Impressions albums and the funk he'd help pioneer as the decade unfolded. Mayfield the guitarist adapted to the wah-wah pedal so quickly and easily it was as if he'd never played any other way see "Turn on to Me," where it sneaks into the arrangement, and "Madame Mary," where it leads the way. The strings and horns that had grown thick on 1969's The Young Mods' Forgotten Story are more relaxed here.
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The Impressions' songs tended to top out at three-and-a-half-minutes even as Curtis Mayfield's sonic ambitions were going far beyond that. So it's no accident that the first song on his first solo album, "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below We're All Gonna Go," is nearly eight minutes long, complete with an intro (and concept) straight out of early, spooky Funkadelic, and "Move on Up" one of Mayfield's most vibrantly hopeful songs earns all nine of its minutes by building a groove that never quits. "We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue" commingles soothing music and biting words as effortlessly as anything in his catalog.
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Writing the music cues for Gordon Parks Jr.'s 1972 saga of a drug dealer's big final score, then composing lyrics based on (and undercutting) the film's characters, Curtis Mayfield made his greatest album and, arguably, the best R&B album of the '70s. Super Fly cemented Mayfield's reputation as black America's most incisive lyrical commentator, thanks to the stinging "Freddie's Dead" and "Little Child Running Wild," not to mention the sardonic title track, a side-eyed celebration of the film's title character: "But when you lose, don't ask no questions why." (Losing, in Mayfield's view, was a foregone conclusion, even if the movie itself ends with Super Fly triumphant.) Even more than Isaac Hayes' Shaft, this is the album that cemented the blaxploitation soundtrack as its own genre-within-a-genre, with Johnny Pate's strings and horns as taut as Mayfield's band itself the same unit that lit up the performances of Curtis/Live! a year earlier. Not to mention Mayfield's guitar: comforting on the instrumental "Think," stinging on "Freddie's Dead," and never more fluent than on the deadly "Pusherman," the only track untouched by Pate's orchestration, and thus acting as the terse counterbalance to the rest of the album in the same way that the soundtrack was to the film.
