A senator was halfway through saying his name when a lighting truss came down out of the sky and crushed his neck. He never walked again. He never played guitar again. He was 48 years old. This is the part of Curtis Mayfield’s story almost nobody tells you. He was a kid from Cabrini Green, Chicago’s most violent housing project.
His father walked out when he was five. His grandmother was a preacher in a spiritualist church. He got his first guitar at 10. He slept with it in his bed. He taught himself to play by tuning the strings to the black keys of the piano. Almost no other guitarist of his era played the instrument that way. On the Chitlin Circuit, a young session player named Jimi Hendrix caught Curtis’s sets whenever he could.
And Hendrix’s bandmates would later say Curtis was all over his playing. The songs that Martin Luther King Jr. carried into the streets to motivate marchers, Curtis wrote them. He founded one of the first black-owned record labels in American soul music. Jay-Z, Diddy, and Dr. Dre all walked through the door he helped kick open.
He cut the core of the Superfly soundtrack in a matter of days. It hit number one on the Billboard 200. On Variety’s album chart, it pushed The Godfather score off the top. He was nominated for eight Grammy Awards. He never won a single competitive one. And then on a windy summer night in Brooklyn at the comeback concert that was supposed to put him back on top, that truss came down while a senator was in the middle of saying his name.
He recorded one final album lying flat on his back, one line at a time, letting gravity push the air through his lungs. His right leg was amputated 22 months before he died. Every date, every chart position, every medical record is real. This is Curtis Mayfield’s story. Number one, the boy with the guitar in his bed.
Curtis Lee Mayfield was born on June 3rd, 1942 at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. His mother Marion raised him alone. His father Kenneth was gone before Curtis was old enough to remember his face. He abandoned the family when Curtis was five. Marion moved her children from one Chicago project to the next until they settled into Cabrini Green on the North Side. That was home.
But the most important person in his early life wasn’t his mother or his absent father. It was his grandmother, Reverend Annabelle Mayfield. She preached in something stranger than a Baptist church, the Traveling Soul Spiritualist Church. A faith with roots in African religion and the cotton fields of Louisiana.
When Curtis was seven, he sang in public for the first time at her storefront church. He joined a gospel quintet called the Northern Jubilee Gospel Singers. One member was a kid from down the street named Jerry Butler. Remember that name. Butler would change everything. But before Butler, there was the guitar.
Curtis was somewhere between seven and 10 when he found one in a closet of the family apartment. He once said, “My guitar was like another me.” He took it everywhere. He slept with it in his bed. He never had a single formal lesson. He sat with records, Muddy Waters, gospel singers, Spanish classical guitarist Andres Segovia, and learned by ear.
By 16, he had dropped out of high school entirely. Music wasn’t going to be a hobby. Music was the way out of Cabrini Green. Number two, the tuning nobody had heard before. This is the part of the Curtis Mayfield story musicians can’t get over. When he taught himself to play as a kid, he didn’t tune the strings the way other guitar players tune them.
He couldn’t read music. What he did know was the piano. And on the piano, he loved playing boogie-woogie in the key of F sharp, which meant playing entirely on the black keys. So, he tuned his guitar to the black keys. Six strings, F sharp, A sharp, C sharp, F sharp, A sharp, F sharp. From low to high, open F sharp tuning.
He used it for the entire 40-year span of his career. Every single song he ever recorded came out of that tuning. What this produced was a sound few people had ever heard. Soft, watery, a guitar that sounded like a piano, a guitar that sounded like a human voice. George Clinton, the genius behind Funkadelic, once put it bluntly.
In the ’60s, every guitar player wanted to play like Curtis. But the man who studied him hardest was a young broke session guitarist named Jimi Hendrix. Back when he was riding the chitlin circuit playing in other people’s bands. Hendrix would catch Curtis Mayfield sets whenever he could.
Hendrix’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell, put it on the record. Jimmy was the only musician he knew who could play in Mayfield’s style, and he’d occasionally break into it on stage. Listen to “Little Wing”. “Castles Made of Sand”. “Drifting”. That guitar is Curtis Mayfield’s vocabulary. And on top of that guitar, that impossible self-invented guitar, Curtis sang.
Not in a chest voice like other R&B singers of his era, in falsetto. A high, fragile, otherworldly falsetto that floated above the music like a ghost in a sunbeam. He was 16 years old walking into the Vee-Jay Records building in Chicago with no idea he was about to start a revolution. Number three, the anthem that marched with King.
In 1958, Curtis Mayfield, age 16, recorded his first hit. The band was called The Roosters. They renamed themselves The Impressions. The song was For Your Precious Love. On the label it said Jerry Butler and The Impressions. It moved fast, climbing to number 11 on the pop chart and number three on the R&B chart.
The Impressions sold out the Apollo Theater for a solid week. Curtis was a teenager. Then Jerry Butler left for a solo career. The Impressions almost died. The label dropped them. Curtis was 19, broke, working as Butler’s road guitarist to pay the rent. And then in 1961, ABC-Paramount Records gave The Impressions one more shot.
With Curtis Mayfield as lead singer, with Curtis Mayfield writing every song. What followed was one of the greatest runs in American music history. Across the rest of the ’60s, Curtis and The Impressions racked up nearly 20 R&B hits in a row, with more than a dozen crossing over to the pop chart. Gypsy Woman.
It’s All Right. A Man. Choice of Colors. This is My Country. But the songs Curtis Mayfield will be remembered for, long after the chart positions are forgotten, are the songs that walked beside Martin Luther King Jr. Keep on Pushing came out in 1964. The Civil Rights Act was about to be signed.
The Freedom Riders were boarding buses in segregated cities. And there was Curtis Mayfield’s voice on the radio singing about a stone wall that could not stop him. It became a sing-along on the Freedom Rides. Black students sang it as they were dragged to jail. Dr. King himself sang it. A year later in 1965, Curtis wrote “People Get Ready”.
The song was directly inspired by Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It became widely embraced as an unofficial anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. Used to motivate marchers, to calm them when they were frightened, to comfort them when they were beaten. Andrew Young, King’s ally, future UN ambassador, future mayor of Atlanta, has spoken about Curtis Mayfield as a prophetic visionary teacher of his time whose tenor carried something close to the spiritual power of Dr. King himself.
40 years later, when a young Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama walked onto the stage of the 2004 Democratic National Convention to deliver the keynote address that made him a national figure, the theme song he used was Curtis Mayfield’s “Keep On Pushing”. Curtis refused to be called a preacher.
He once said, “I was capable of being able to say these things and yet not make a person feel as though they’re being preached at.” He was 26 years old. He had written the music for a revolution. And he was just getting started. Number four, own yourself. Here is something most people don’t know about Curtis Mayfield.
He was furious about how little money he made from his own songs. Barely out of his teens, he did something almost no black soul artist of his generation had done. He founded his own music publishing company. He called it Curtom. By that move alone, he made sure that he, and not the record label, owned the rights to his compositions.
And then in 1968, the year Dr. King was killed and American cities burned, he co-founded Curtom Records with his manager, Eddie Thomas. A full label. His Impressions came with him. Donny Hathaway’s earliest singles came out on Curtom. Curtis told Jerry Butler, “I just want to own as much of me as possible.
” His son, Todd, later wrote, “When my father started recording in 1958, no Negro artist owned their work.” Every black artist running a label today, Jay-Z, Diddy, Dr. Dre, Kanye, Russell Simmons, is walking through a door Curtis Mayfield helped kick open in 1968. And he did it with no MBA, no backing investor, just a kid from Cabrini-Green who decided he wasn’t going to be cheated anymore.
Number five, the soundtrack that beat The Godfather. In 1970, Curtis left The Impressions to go solo. His debut album was titled simply Curtis. It predated Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On by months. It hit number 19 on the Billboard 200 and number one on the R&B chart. It contained “Move On Up”, a song that would decades later be re-engineered by Kanye West into the international hit “Touch the Sky”.
But, it was the third solo album that changed everything. In late 1971, after a sold-out show at Lincoln Center in New York, two men slipped backstage. The screenwriter, Philip Fenty, and the producer, Sig Shore. They had a film script in their hands. They asked Curtis if he would compose the soundtrack.
The film was called Super Fly, a blaxploitation film, about a Harlem cocaine dealer named Youngblood Priest, trying to make one last big score. Curtis read the script on the flight back to Chicago. By the time the plane landed, he had already written one song. He hated what he saw in the script. He thought the movie glamorized drug dealing.
His wife Altheida said, “Curtis thought Superfly was a commercial to sell cocaine.” So, Curtis decided to subvert the film. He wouldn’t write songs that celebrated Young Blood Priest. He would write songs that criticized him. The soundtrack would be the conscience the movie didn’t have.
He cut the core of the album in a matter of days at RCA Studios in Chicago. The album dropped on July 11th, 1972, 1 month before the movie hit theaters. By the end of October, it was number one on the Billboard 200, the only album by a black artist to top the pop chart that year. It went on to sell well over a million copies.
By many accounts, the soundtrack earned more money than the film itself, a rare reversal. And on Variety’s album chart, it pushed The Godfather score off the top. The film glamorized the pusher man. Curtis’s song Pusher Man was a damning portrait of the same character. Years later, when hip-hop started building itself out of samples, those lines became sacred text.
The Notorious B.I.G. stage name itself came from a character in Curtis’s later soundtrack, Let’s Do It Again. The Library of Congress selected Superfly for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2019. It was the peak of his career, and it was downhill from there. Number six, the decade of invisibility.
For about 5 years after Superfly, Curtis Mayfield could do no wrong. Then the radio turned on him. He kept scoring films. Claudine with Gladys Knight. Let’s Do It Again with the Staple Singers. That title track went to number one on both pop and R&B charts. Sparkle with Aretha Franklin. But then disco arrived, and the cultural lights began dimming on the soul man of the early ’70s.
The albums kept coming out. The sales kept shrinking. In 1980, he moved his family from Chicago to Atlanta. He closed down the Curtom recording operation. The Chicago soul era ended on that day. Not with a bang, with a U-Haul truck heading south. Through the ’80s, he toured Japan, England, Europe. American radio mostly forgot him.
And then in 1989, something shifted. A new generation rediscovered the Curtom catalog. Mayfield was hot again. He cut two albums in 1990. Take It to the Streets and The Return of Superfly, collaborating with Ice-T. He went out on the road again. He was 48 years old, and the comeback was real. In January 1991, the Impressions would be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The man who had written the soundtrack to the civil rights movement was finally going to get the respect he had earned. He was 96 hours away from being celebrated. Number seven, the storm at Wingate Field. Monday, August 13th, 1990. Wingate Field, Flatbush, Brooklyn. A free outdoor concert thrown by New York State Senator Martin Markowitz.
An annual thank you to his constituents. Around 10,000 people in the field. Curtis Mayfield was the headliner. The stage stood directly across the street from Kings County Hospital. That detail will matter in 20 minutes. The weather had been threatening all afternoon. Storm clouds rolling, wind picking up.
The smart move was to cancel. Markowitz refused. There were too many people there. He decided to move Curtis’s setup before the storm hit. Markowitz walked to the microphone. He started his introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve decided that we’re going to bring up Curtis Mayfield. I’m thrilled. At the word thrilled, a massive gust of wind blew through the field.
It threw the first two rows from their seats. It knocked the speakers over. It toppled the cymbals on the drum riser. Curtis’s drummer, Lee Goodness, lunged. His left arm shot out and caught the cymbals before they hit the ground. His right hand kept the beat going. He didn’t drop a single bar. Markowitz kept talking.
He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Curtis Mayfield.” Curtis took a step toward the stage. Then the second gust hit. Reports later put it as high as 54 mph. It heaved the front lighting truss, a heavy metal rig hanging above the stage, straight off its supports. The truss tumbled. It knocked the back truss off as it fell. The front truss came down.
As it fell, individual stage lights peeled off and dropped like burning hail. One of those falling lights struck Curtis Mayfield in the back of the neck. He crumpled to the ground. Then the entire truss landed. The truss pulverized the tom drums. It pinned Curtis underneath. Lee Goodness’s bass drum took the impact at the last second.
That single kick drum caught the weight of the rig just enough that the truss didn’t crush Curtis’s chest entirely. That drum kit saved his life. At least six other people were injured, among them a 12-year-old girl. Then the rain finally started, huge drops. People in the crowd screaming. Curtis later told the Independent in 1994, “I don’t remember anything.
I don’t even remember falling. The next thing I knew, I was lying on my back.” And then I discovered that neither my hands nor my arms were where I thought they were, and I couldn’t move. The ambulance only had to travel across the street. The diagnosis, broken vertebrae at C3, C4, and C5. The third, fourth, and fifth bones of his neck.
Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed from the neck down, quadriplegic. He would never walk again. He would never play a guitar again. He was 48 years old. His son Todd has attributed the disaster to gross negligence on the part of the concert promoters. When his son arrived at the hospital from Atlanta, Curtis was hooked up to a ventilator. He couldn’t speak.
He could only mouth words. The words he mouthed were, “Take care of the finances.” His comeback was over. Most people in his shoes would have stopped. Number eight. Line by line, lying on his back. For nearly 4 years, Curtis Mayfield did not sing a note in public. He was learning how to live with quadriplegia.
He was battling atrophy. His feet curled downward from disuse. He suffered persistent urinary tract infections from the catheter. He developed what he called bantam hands, a sensation he compared to thrusting his arms in a bucket of writhing snakes. Type 2 diabetes set in. He said, “I think overall I’m dealing with it pretty good, but you can’t help but wake up every once in a while with a tear in your eye.
” But, he wasn’t done. In 1992, 2 years after the accident, he recorded a verse on a tribute album called All Men Are Brothers. The tribute featured Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen. He recorded that verse lying on his back. That was the discovery. He couldn’t sit up. He couldn’t expand his diaphragm to push air through his lungs the way a singer needs to.
But, if he lay flat on his back, gravity itself would pull his chest down. Gravity would do the work his muscles couldn’t do anymore. He could sing, one line at a time, buoyed by that breakthrough, and by the Grammy Legend Award he received in 1994, and by the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award he received in 1995. Curtis decided to make a full new album.
In late 1995 and early 1996 in Atlanta, the man who had recorded the Civil Rights Movement lay flat on the floor of his home recording studio. Producers worked around him. Microphones lowered, tape rolling, one line, pause, breathe, another line, pause, breathe. The room would go still between every phrase, waiting for him to find the next breath.
The album was called New World Order. It dropped on September 20th, 1996. It received three Grammy nominations, including Best R&B Album. The man who had been told he would never sing again had made a record the Grammys were honoring. His widow, Altheida, said it more simply than anyone else ever has.
He broke his back, but not his spirit. Number nine, the trophies he couldn’t lift. In February 1998, 8 years after the accident, Curtis Mayfield’s right leg was amputated. Type 2 diabetes, accelerated by his immobility, by the catheter infections, by the years of bed-bound life, had taken the circulation in his leg below the danger point.
The amputation was the only way to stop the gangrene from killing him. 22 months later, he would be dead. On March 15th, 1999, Curtis Mayfield was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the second time as a solo artist. He’d already been inducted with The Impressions in 1991. That made him a rare double inductee.
The class of 1999 was extraordinary. Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Dusty Springfield. Curtis Mayfield was too sick to attend his own ceremony. Eight Grammy nominations across his career. He had never won a single competitive Grammy. That fact deserves to sit with you for a moment.
The man who wrote the soundtrack of the civil rights movement, the man who scored Super Fly, the man whose songs Martin Luther King Jr. used to motivate marchers, the man who built one of the first black-owned soul labels, the man who recorded an entire album lying flat on his back so gravity could move his lungs. Eight nominations, zero competitive wins.
He was harder to categorize than the Grammy voters seem to want him to be. Number 10, what he left behind. On the morning of December 26, 1999, the day after Christmas, at 7:20 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, Curtis Lee Mayfield died at North Fulton Regional Hospital in Roswell, Georgia. Cause of death, complications of type 2 diabetes.
He was 57 years old. He left behind his second wife, Altheida, and a large family. Atlanta chose “People Get Ready” as its official millennium theme song for 1999. The song that Dr. King had carried into the streets of Selma was now playing over the loudspeakers of Atlanta’s millennium broadcast.
The author was buried beneath it. But, the legacy isn’t in the trophies. The legacy is in the music that won’t stop moving. Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky” is built on “Move On Up”. Kanye and Jay-Z’s “The Joy” samples “The Makings of You”. Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta” samples “Kung Fu”. Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, they have all reached into the Curtom catalog and pulled out something they needed.
Curtis Mayfield built the foundation that hip-hop and modern R&B stand on top of. And he did it without ever knowing they would build there. According to his son and biographer, Todd Mayfield, more than 100 unreleased Curtis Mayfield songs still sit in the Curtom vaults. Songs the world has never heard. Curtis Mayfield was a kid from Cabrini Green who taught himself to play guitar by tuning the strings to the black keys of a piano.
He wrote the songs that Martin Luther King Jr. carried into the streets. He scored a soundtrack that pushed The Godfather off the top of the album charts. He spent the last 9 years of his life as a quadriplegic. The last 22 months missing his right leg. He recorded his final album lying flat on his back.
He died on the day after Christmas without ever winning a competitive Grammy. The trust came down on a Monday night in Brooklyn, but the music never did. He once said, “My guitar was like another me.” That guitar is still talking. If this story moved you, do this one thing. Tonight, put on People Get Ready. Just that one song. Listen to the falsetto.
Listen to what a man from a Chicago housing project handed to a movement. Then, hit subscribe. We’re covering another forgotten genius in our next video. A story even more devastating than this one. Drop a comment and tell us which Curtis Mayfield song hit you first. We read every single one. Until next time, keep on pushing.
