Crash Course, No. 38: Curtis Mayfield, The Gentle Genius

Legend.

This past week, I tried to get past the only Curtis Mayfield album most people know, 1972’s Super Fly. I could only go so far. The man was crazy prolific, certainly more than I knew.

A Very Short History
Mayfield was born in Chicago in 1942. Because his father left when he was young, he was raised by his mother and his grandmother and very much in the church and the church’s choir. The family moved to Chicago’s North Side and he spent his teen years at the (in)famous Cabrini-Green housing project. Mayfield did not, however, spend much of his teens in high school.

His first step toward his separate musical life came when he found his first guitar at age 7 or 8 (or 10). With Muddy Waters and Andres Segovia for models, he taught himself to play and embraced the instrument to the point of sleeping with it and later saying “my guitar is another me.” He formed his first singing groups in the mid-1960s with his friend Jerry Butler. With Arthur and Richard Brooks in the mix, they performed as the Roosters; when Sam Gooden came on board, they became The Impressions. Mayfield wrote and arranged songs before and after the switch.

A lot of The Impressions music passed through Mayfield’s hands and mind (though not their first hit, “For Your Precious Love”), and he helped pioneer Chicago’s response to Detroit’s Motown, a mix of soul, R&B, and gospel. With The Impressions as his megaphone, Mayfield wrote what some people called the soundtrack of the Civil Rights movement, with anthems like “Keep on Pushing,” “We’re a Winner,” and probably the most famous number “People Get Ready” (which, for the record, was the first song that featured Mayfield’s guitar work). He eventually took his distinct singing voice to lead vocals for the group and they churned out hit after hit after hit, through the 1960s, including five in the Top 20 in the same year the Beatles came to America. And now the story flips:

“Mayfield had written much of the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s, but by the end of the decade, he was a pioneering voice in the black pride movement along with James Brown and Sly Stone.”

One Hit No More, No. 47: The Five Stairsteps, A Happy Place, and Several Surprises

It's fine. But their dad was a cop. I'm still...

The Hit
The Five Stairsteps, “O-o-h Child” recalls such a vivid memory for me that it’s pretty much all I think of when I hear the song. A friend of mine went to Evergreen State College and, on one of the many visits, we went on a road-trip with a bunch of friends - think this was to the Oregon Coast, actually. Because we piled God knows how many people into too few cars, I had no seat, so I lounged across the back. That was first time I’d heard “O-o-h Child,” and when it came on, my head was resting in a woman’s lap, someone I’d just met. She was singing along, like everyone else, but watching her sing is the only thing I remember.

There’s no story after that; she never became a friend or a girlfriend (though I did meet her once later and that weekend came up, and there was a definite, "oh, shit, why didn't we?!" conversation); it was just that moment, watching a young woman sing a beautiful, heartwarming, hopeful song flush with the optimism of youth. She sang it like she believed it, and that felt very true in the moment…

…what was I talking about again? In all seriousness, I love this one. Great instrumentation, great open spaces for the vocals, a killer chorus, and an outro that sends you to the moon. And yet there's more...

The Rest of the Story
I almost covered The Five Stairsteps in a train-wreck I cobbled together about Super K Productions/Buddah Records, but I held back when I spotted them on the list of one-hit wonders I’m mining for all this. That’s probably for the best because The Five Stairsteps make for an odd fit in the Buddah Records extended universe (e.g., a lot of white garage bands from Ohio).

The Five Stairsteps came out of Chicago as a family act under the guidance of their parents, Betty and Clarence Burke Sr. Clarence Sr. was a detective with the Chicago P.D., but he also played a couple instruments (he backed The Five Stairsteps on guitar and bass, apart from managing them) and he knew some helpful people - notably, Fred Cash of The Impressions (theseguys). Their kids formed the band - in age order, Clarence Jr., Alohe, Dennis, James, Kenneth “Keni,” and, much later, Hubie - with Clarence Sr. and Clarence Jr. writing their material with help from a guy named Gregory Fowler. The name for the act came to Betty Burke when she saw her kids standing lined up by age; they looked like five stairsteps, you see…