Still, party music was not my father’s forte, and somewhere deep down he knew it. Serious changes were afoot in America, treacherous ones. The movement had entered a new phase the year before when James Meredith desegregated the University of Mississippi in Oxford. It took five hundred armed guards to allow Meredith to register, and even then, sneering students assailed the marshals with stones, bottles, bricks, clubs, iron bars, gasoline bombs, and guns.
Then, in early May 1963, the movement had its most public, iconic, and brutal moment yet when the Birmingham police turned skin-searing fire hoses and snarling dogs on a group of peaceful demonstrators. Water cannons ripped the clothes off the demonstrators’ backs, and images of the travesty rocketed around the world.
My father paid rapt attention to the news. More than that, he watched the country seethe in turmoil as he traveled the South. The Impressions performed in Birmingham around this time and Eddie remembers, “The hatred was strong, strong in Birmingham. We did our show and we left. We didn’t stay around.” The indignities my father suffered traveling through the South, and those he watched others endure, stirred the soul deep within him.
In August, Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies pulled off the biggest public demonstration the movement would ever stage—the March on Washington. They hoped to pressure the government into passing the Civil Rights Act, which Kennedy had quietly introduced months before. On a sunny Wednesday morning, more than two hundred thousand people marched to the Lincoln Memorial, and the movement elbowed its way to center stage in American life. “The Negro is shedding himself of his fear,” King said, “and my real worry is how we will keep this fearlessness from rising to violent proportions.”
Fortunately, the march remained nonviolent, and when King rose to give his speech, the spirit of the crowd overtook him. “I started out reading the speech,” he said, “and all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used many times before, that thing about ‘I had a dream,’ and I just felt that I wanted to use it here. I don’t know why, I hadn’t thought about it before the speech.”
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech might have been off-the-cuff, but it was recognized immediately as one of the great pieces of oration in American history. A poet himself, my father recognized the speech’s beauty and latched onto its spirit, even as another faction of the movement mocked King’s hope. This other faction, less patient and peaceful, was summed up by Malcolm X’s reaction to the speech: “You know, this dream of King’s is going to be a nightmare before it’s over.” Two weeks later, dynamite blasted apart Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killed four young Negro girls attending Sunday school.
A few months later, a bullet ended President Kennedy’s life in Dallas, Texas, throwing the country and movement into panic. Kennedy was the most sympathetic president to Negro rights since a bullet ended Abraham Lincoln’s life a hundred years before. An eerie similarity between the two assassinations existed—in 1963, as in 1865, a southerner named Johnson ascended to the presidency. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, ended the Reconstruction and plunged Negroes back into quasi-slavery for the next hundred years. No one knew how Kennedy’s successor, a tough, drawling Texan named Lyndon Johnson, would react to the fight against Jim Crow.
During this time of great uncertainty, many movement activists adopted “It’s All Right” as a message song. They took strength and solace from lyrics like “When you wake up early in the morning / Feeling sad like so many of us do / Hum a little soul, make life your goal / And surely something’s got to come to you.” My father didn’t mean it that way—he wasn’t quite mature enough as an artist. Regardless, the song spoke to the activists, giving them the assurance they needed to continue their difficult, dangerous work. Noticing the way people interpreted his song inspired Dad and opened his mind to new possibilities.
As 1963 drew to a close, it seemed everyone was talking, arguing, and worrying about the country’s state. James Farmer, director of CORE, eloquently outlined the movement’s goals on a PBS panel discussion featuring Malcolm X, Wyatt Tee Walker, and Ebony magazine editor Alan Morrison, saying:
We aren’t going to stop until black skin is no longer considered a badge of deformity by the American people, we are not going to stop until the dogs stop biting little children in Alabama, until the rats in tenement slums in Harlem and the hundred Harlems throughout the country stop biting our people. We are not going to stop until the bigots of the South and the North no longer challenge a man’s right to live simply because he is asking for the rights which the Constitution says are his … We are not going to stop, in a word, until we have the same rights that all Americans have. We are not going to stop until we have jobs and are not walking the street unemployed in a proportion which is more than two times as great as among whites. We are not going to stop until we have the right to a house, a decent home, an apartment, any place we choose to live. We are not going to stop until we have the right to enter any place which serves the public all over the country. We are not going to stop, in a word, until America becomes America for all people.
At the same time, Malcolm X continued sniping at the stated purpose and so-called gains of the movement: “If the NAACP can tell me that they won a desegregation decision for me ten years ago, but yet the schools haven’t been desegregated, this is a victory with no victory. It’s a victory that you can talk about, but it’s a victory that you can’t show me … We don’t want to be equal with the white man. He’s not the criteria or yard stick by which equality is measured. He’s not in a position to tell us we are equal. It’s not his right. It’s not his to do.”
As these factions battled within the movement, pop music joined its ranks. The recent events of the era inspired Bob Dylan to write a powerful message song called “Blowin’ in the Wind.” When Dad’s idol, Sam Cooke, heard the song he couldn’t believe a white man had written it. Cooke decided to make his own statement, producing a three-minute opus called “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
Dad heard these songs, and he also heard the people around him talking about their struggles, fears, hardships, and hopes. With the birth of his first son—Curtis III, nicknamed “Curt Curt”—in 1963, he contemplated the invisible box that constricted American Negroes through the eyes of his child. He yearned to throw his own work into the growing fray of socially conscious songs. He knew he could add something valuable to the fight. Even at such a young age, he was a big-picture thinker. He wasn’t the type to pick up a sign and start marching or get involved in the day-to-day machinations of the movement. Rather, he could observe it from a wide angle and use his poetic mind to craft something that spoke to people’s souls, same as the gospel tunes he sang in Annie Bell’s church.
He didn’t have much time to write such a song, though. On top of the demands of a new baby, which Helen bore the brunt of, he also had to capitalize on the success of “It’s All Right” and write new material for Major and other OKeh artists. To cover the gap, ABC released the Impressions’ first album—a compilation of their singles to date. It featured ten of my father’s compositions, as well as a song credited to Richard Brooks, and the Impressions’ cover of Johnny Ace’s doo-wop classic “Never Let Me Go.” The latter is particularly interesting—it proves the Impressions could have been a hell of a doo-wop group had they wanted, but Curtis’s mind had long since wandered to other places.
In January 1964, the Impressions released “Talking About My Baby,” which rose to number twelve on the pop chart. Like “It’s All Right” before it, “Talking About My Baby” was made for the party crowd. The song shows the Impressions continuing to perfect the gospel-tinged interplay among the three voices and also contains another example of my father’s brilliance on the guitar. Listen to how he phrases the first three chords of the song, how he flicks those first two hard and then lays back and lets the third just happen, dead in the pocket with the sock cymbal. That’s his genius.
The next month, the Beatles debuted on The Ed Sullivan
Show, marking the beginning of the British Invasion, which would crowd the pop charts for the rest of the decade. Even so, Curtis found space for several hits cut by Billy Butler, whom he taught to play guitar. Billy played with the Enchanters, and they toured with the Impressions, Gene Chandler, the Vibrations, and the Drifters throughout ’63 and ’64. They didn’t have a hit until Curtis wrote “Gotta Get Away,” which spent three consecutive weeks on the R&B chart, followed by “Nevertheless,” “You’re Gonna Be Sorry,” “Does It Matter,” and “I’m Just a Man.” Gene Chandler also recorded a dozen of Curtis’s songs, most hitting the R&B charts.
Major needed new material too, so Curtis gave him songs like “It Ain’t No Use,” “Girls,” and “Rhythm.” At the end of 1963, Major had released another of my father’s songs, “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um (Curious Mind),” and by early ’64 it had become bigger than “The Monkey Time.” It seemed impossible that one man could write so many hits in such a short time, but Dad’s prolific pen never ran dry.
“Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um (Curious Mind)” gave Carl Davis his first taste of my father’s uncompromising business sense. The original lyrics told the story of mystical sirens who sang a song so beautiful, dumbstruck sailors couldn’t help but steer toward the island and shipwreck. Davis didn’t think this Homeric tale had legs in the pop market, so he asked Curtis to rewrite the lyrics and include a love story.
With any other artist, Davis’s suggestion would earn him songwriting credit. But as he recalled, “[Curtis] would never share any of the writing credits with me or anyone else. Because of that, he never shared any of the revenues with me either. That’s something that Curtis just wouldn’t do … He wouldn’t give up any of his publishing or writing credits. If you worked with Curtis, you had to do things his way.” Or, as Herb Kent put it: “If you made a dollar, then Curtis made five.”
My father remained this way throughout his career, causing irreparable rifts with some of his closest friends. But, for as many royalties as Davis lost, Dad lost something perhaps more valuable by allowing so many other artists to score huge hits with his songs. It kept him obscure. If these hits had all come out on the Impressions, which they could have, the true extent of his genius would have been impossible to miss. Diffused as the songs were, my father remained just under the radar. No one could complain too much, though, as “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um” hit number five on the pop chart and went to the top of the R&B chart—my father’s second number one.
He was on a serious roll. Unlike at Motown, where a factory of writers created the hits, at OKeh, Curtis was the factory. He didn’t spend too much time worrying about where the credit went, as long as the money came to the right place, and the next Impressions single kept the money rolling in. “I’m So Proud” was a gorgeous ballad that hit high on the charts, although the group never wanted it released as a single. As Fred recalled:
The record company called and said, “We’re gonna release ‘I’m So Proud.’” We had a fit. We were still writing it, and we wanted to release an up-tempo tune called “I’m the One Who Loves You.” They bet us any amount of money that this song, “I’m So Proud,” was going to be a big hit for the Impressions … Man, that killed our groove for the whole day … We were young, not knowing that the record company had the money; they could make it a hit record if they wanted to. And they did. That was one of our biggest records. After they got through with it, they said, “All right, what do y’all think now?” We had to eat our words.
The label’s decision turned out fortuitous for more than just the Impressions. At that time, three kids in Jamaica formed a loose little group called the Wailers, and they based their sound and style on the Impressions. The trio of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer even dressed like the Impressions. As Bunny recalled, “We were fascinated by the way they did this song, ‘I’m So Proud.’ Out of that song came [the Wailers’] ‘It Hurts to Be Alone.’” When the Impressions toured Jamaica that year, the young Wailers sat in the first row of the Carib Theatre.
At the time of the Impressions’ visit, Jamaica suffered under a racist system similar to America’s, and the island’s own civil rights movement had just begun burgeoning. As my father watched his Caribbean brothers struggle, it reignited his passion to write songs that spoke to the times. He dipped back to his days listening to Annie Bell’s sermons, pondering the power of the church while watching his country change around him.
Across the South, movement activists continued to die grisly deaths. Closer to Curtis’s home, comedian and activist Dick Gregory led protest marches through Mayor Daley’s segregated neighborhood in Chicago. Martin Luther King Jr. was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize—he’d already been Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1963—and Congress seemed tantalizingly close to passing the Civil Rights Act. Meanwhile, great antagonism electrified the gap between militants like Malcolm X and moderates like King. My father revered King and believed Negroes couldn’t let these divisions stop their momentum.
With all that in mind, he started scribbling lyrics and fitting them to a melody. He finished the song in a hotel room on tour. Around two in the morning, Fred heard a gentle knock on his door. He cracked it open and squinted into the hallway light. He could just make out my father standing there in his pajamas. “Hey man, come and listen to this and see what you think of it,” my father said. “I wrote something that maybe can help motivate the people.”
Cradling his guitar at the edge of his bed, he played “Keep On Pushing” for the first time. When he finished, Fred stood dumbstruck. “Where did you come up with all these words?” he finally asked. My father replied, “I’m living.”
Dad had been training to write a song like “Keep On Pushing” his entire life. It used the same rhythms he learned in Annie Bell’s church, only now the terms had changed. He said, “All I needed to do was change ‘God gave me strength, and it don’t make sense not to keep on pushing,’ to ‘I’ve got my strength, and it don’t make sense.’ … Nothing else needed to be changed.”
“Keep On Pushing” explodes from the speaker with a crash cymbal, while Dad’s guitar flutters around the beat like a hummingbird. He sings the whole song in falsetto and hits an extra gear in the chorus, pushing himself near the limit of his range. Up there, he unleashes a gorgeous warble from a place few men can reach. During the verses, Johnny’s hypnotic horn line echoes the vocal melody, flirting with the waltz rhythm, and providing a contrapuntal call-and-response as my father, Fred, and Sam sing:
Look a yonder, what’s that I see?
A great big stone wall stands there ahead of me
But I’ve got my pride, and I move the wall aside
And keep on pushing. Hallelujah! Keep on pushing.
The song was a call to arms, a salve to the fractures within the movement, and a message of hope. “Move up a little higher, some way, somehow,” my father urged. He never wanted to be a preacher, but he’d just written his first sermon. Like the best sermons—King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, for example, which still rung in Dad’s head—it had a strong hook and made the impossible seem within reach.
Unlike a religious preacher, though, Dad paired his sermons with melody and rhythm. DJs put them in heavy rotation on radio stations across the country. In such a way, he could preach to people who never set foot in a church, and do it without them knowing it. “Painless preaching,” he’d later call it. The single came out in July and rose to the top slot of the R&B chart—my father’s third number one.
Curtis the messenger had arrived.
After “Keep On Pushing,” Dad became an icon. People began recognizing him when he went out to dinner or walked down the street. They’d approach him breathlessly, sometimes wanting an autograph, sometimes just wanting to shake his hand. He’d smile from ear to ear and charm them with his soft voice. He always reacted graciously, and he noticed the effect he had. His fans seemed to glow as they walked away from meeting him. “It wasn’t like they were starstruck,” my brother Tracy recalls
. “It was more admiration, humble admiration for him.”
Now he had more than just money. His face became a form of currency—dark skin, big teeth, and all. It set him apart in a good way. The name Curtis Mayfield was currency too. It meant something. Uncle Kenny recalls going to a convenience store with Curtis and Marion, and when Curtis walked up to the counter to buy something, the cashier said, “Man, you look like Curtis Mayfield.” Dad said, “I am Curtis Mayfield.” “Aw, you lyin’,” the man said. In later years, after the novelty of fame had worn off, my father might have let it drop at that, happy to get away unmolested. For now, he said, “There’s my mother, there’s my brother—you ask them.” The cashier glowed, too. That was the power of fame.
The added attention cut both ways, though—it helped relieve my father’s insecurities, but it also added new ones. He could never know who his real friends were. People came at him from all directions. If someone went out of their way to treat him well, he had to gauge their motives. A host of hard questions faced him at every turn—who do you trust, who do you let close, how do you know if they want to hurt you? Some-times—as Fred, Sam, Eddie, and Johnny would soon learn—he’d put his trust in the wrong people, treating friends like enemies and vice versa.
As “Keep On Pushing” rode high on the charts, the eponymous album followed in suit. Keep On Pushing was the Impressions’ first proper album, as opposed to a collection of singles, and it reflected the growing trend in pop music. The album as a statement existed long before 1964, but it was fast becoming the dominant art form in a world once ruled by singles. The Impressions released Keep On Pushing into a musical landscape still quaking from the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, Otis Redding’s Pain in My Heart, and the Supremes’ Where Did Our Love Go. These came out alongside landmark albums by the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Sam Cooke, Muddy Waters, the Beach Boys, the Miracles, and a plethora of other soon-to-be icons. With Keep On Pushing, the Impressions put themselves at the forefront of this exploding musical landscape and exited the doo-wop age forever.
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