Belief in Lyric

Abstract

We might well one day find forgiveness, those of us who failed to notice Curtis Mayfield when we first heard the first hit by Impressions. one thing, the label on the 45-rpm single clearly identified the artists as But- ler and the Impressions, and who on hearing Butler's baritone wouldn't be for- ever haunted? For Your Precious Love, he sang, going on to enumerate just what love might mean. They were his words, rolling over the all too familiar four-chord pop ballad form of the day, that seemingly eternal unwinding C, Am, F, and G. We noticed the guitar endlessly picking that pattern, but there was nothing that particularly stood about it, as cleanly intoned as it was. We didn't know it was played by the same man who was adding the high tenor to the mix. That man was Curtis Mayfield, and when Jerry Butler soon went on his own, it was with Curtis Mayfield on stage beside him, playing guitar and supplying songs, the very songs that made The Ice Man so memorable. By the time we heard He Don't Love Like I Love You, it was harder to ignore Mayfield, whose high harmonies moved in glorious tandem with Butler through the choruses. That same tandem movement made other songs stand from the mass of pop molasses, songs like Find Yourself Another Girl, I'm A'Telling You, and so many more. But it was when Curtis Mayfield became the clear front man for Impressions that the world began to realize the breadth of his abilities. Gypsy Woman was just a hint of what was to come, and when May- field joined Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, and others in penning songs that spoke from and to the rapidly gathering storms of social change, he quickly became the very poet of the civil rights era. Keep on Pushing, This Is My Country, We're a Winner were anthems for an age, and when Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions sang People Get Ready, the people got ready. Impressions crossed over, found acclaim in venues far removed from the Chitlin' Circuit, and made a lasting impression. Their formula was not new; Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and so many others had brought gospel and pop together, seemingly reuniting gospel with its sometimes forsaken blues roots, sometimes wedding it to the most earthy of love lyrics. But the ethereal harmonies of Impressions added, as it were, a new note to that mix, a note that even someone as out as Jimi Hendrix would borrow for his soaring Electric Lady Land, a song that mimes Impressions' harmonies, mining them for soul in an intergalactic psychedelia that in turn influenced late Curtis Mayfield production techniques. In the 1963 film Lilies of the Field, West Indian actor Sydney Poitier plays the role of a man who instructs a group of Eastern European Catholic nuns who have set up shop in the Arizona desert in the proper singing and enunciation of the song Amen, a song so instantly recognizable that many filmgoers thought they had heard it, that it was an old spiritual, not the new composition by the writer with the seemingly unlikely name of Jester-Jester Hairston. Poitier won his first Oscar for that film, as well as a Golden Globe, and the film itself won prizes at festivals around the world. Curtis Mayfield saw the film and was de- termined to cover the song with Impressions. resulting record became the first hit for the post-Butler group that Mayfield hadn't written himself. Mayfield arrangement of Hairston's song was meant to point both backward toward the past of black and unknown bards and forward into the new world the civil rights movement presaged; the recording opened to the strains of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, and moved to a marching rhythm suited to the determined youth of the day. song went to number one on the R&B charts and charted at number seven on the pop listings, a significant accomplishment for any black artist in 1964 and one that rode the cresting wave of the folk revival as it met and merged with emerging soul and socially conscious lyric poetry. …