Traveling Soul (20 page)

Life had never been so good. Then, two weeks before Christmas, Sam Cooke was brutally murdered under circumstances that remain mysterious. After so many dizzying highs, Curtis greeted 1965 mourning both his brother and his hero.

It was a harbinger of things to come.

“What has happened, what has caused this to be?
Have I become insane or is this true reality?”

—“I'
VE
F
OUND
T
HAT
I'
VE
L
OST
”

F
ebruary 21, 1965, Audubon Ballroom, Manhattan
—Malcolm X knew the men who came to kill him. Standing before a large crowd of Negro Muslims, he prepared to give his remarks on his new Organization of Afro-American Unity. Before he could start, a man walked to the stage, raised a sawed-off shotgun concealed under his coat, and pulled the trigger. On cue, two other men stood up and emptied handguns into Malcolm's body.

The months leading to Malcolm X's assassination marked the most intense and fractious period since the movement had begun. As his biographer Manning Marable wrote, “The fragile unity that had made possible the great efforts in Montgomery and Birmingham was showing signs of strain. The arguments between so-called radicals like John Lewis and more mainstream black leaders like King and Ralph Abernathy had not abated, and as long-desired goals finally came within sight, they had the peculiar effect of further splintering the movement.”

Watching the movement unravel around him, Dad found solace, as always, in his guitar. In what he called “a deep mood, a spiritual state of
mind,” he put together the follow-up to “Keep On Pushing.” He showed the song—a breathtaking ballad called “People Get Ready”—to Johnny in his normal way. “Curtis would usually bring me the material on a cassette tape,” Johnny said. “When he brought me the songs, it was nothing but guitar and voice. Generally, with Curtis, he would have no idea what the arrangement was going to sound like until we got to the session. We never had the opportunity to sit down and work out an arrangement together. He would bring me the basic tape, and at that point, he'd get back with Fred and Sam, they would work out the harmonies, and then we would hit the studio.”

Fred and Sam learned the song, but before hitting the studio, they had a run of shows with the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, and the Marvelettes. At the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, they gave the audience a tantalizing hint of what was to come.

During the show, they got into a singing battle with the Temptations. Fred recalled, “The Temptations went out and did one of our songs, ‘Gypsy Woman.' So when it was time for us to go on, we went out and did one of their songs, ‘The Girl's Alright with Me.' And then, it was on. We would do a song; they would do a song. The host of the show was Georgie Woods, and he just let us go at it.”

After the third or fourth encore, the Impressions stood backstage caught in a bind. They'd run out of songs, but the audience screamed for more. My father said, “Well, we got ‘People Get Ready.'” Sam nervously spoke up: “Are you sure we can do this song? We just learned it.” My father replied in his customary seat-of-the-pants way, “Sure, let's give it a try.” They returned onstage to a chorus of cheers, and Dad plucked the opening chords. “You could almost hear a pin drop in there,” Sam said. “It was so soulful, man, it just knocked these people out.”

It knocked Johnny out, too. “The song touched me quite a bit,” he said. “I listened to the lyrics, I listened to the melody, and I thought, ‘This could be a big, big song,' because of the message that was involved, for one thing, and because of the way Curtis was delivering it. You could tell he was bringing something really that he felt.” They cut it immediately
after the tour ended, and ABC released the single just after Malcolm's assassination.

“People Get Ready” plays like a meditation, a hymn, a love letter to the fathomless strength and endless struggle of Negroes in America. It opens with a haunting, hummed melody that sends chills up the spine. Johnny's arrangement is masterful—pizzicato strings and lilting violin lines weaving around plinking chimes. Once Curtis begins singing, it is clear he'd found a way to merge the movement's vast hope with the fierce sadness and pain Negroes experienced trying to make that hope a reality.

My father intended “People Get Ready” to reach far back in history, even as it kept an eye on the future. His lyrics brought the coded messages of old Negro spirituals into the turbulent '60s. When he sang about a train to Jordan, everyone fighting for their rights in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia knew what he meant. Everyone who had migrated to Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and California knew it too.

It was the same train that formed the Underground Railroad during slavery; it was the train that brought Annie Bell and millions like her to northern cities during the Great Migration; it was the movement train my father's generation boarded, determined to get to a better place or die trying.

Like “Keep On Pushing,” the song had heavy gospel roots. “Lyrically you could tell it's from parts of the Bible,” Dad said.

“There's no room for the hopeless sinner who would hurt all mankind just to save his own / Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner, for there's no hiding place against the kingdom's throne.” It's an ideal. There's a message there. I couldn't help myself for it. And it was also my own teachings, me talking to myself about my own moral standards. As a kid, sometimes you have nobody to turn to. I could always go back to some of the sermons and talk to myself in a righteous way. I had heard preachers speak of how there is “no
hiding place.” If you've been around enough preachers, you'll see how their words are in the song in one form or another. I wanted to bring a little gospel into the drive for reality with the song, and it also lent a pride to those who were oppressed and trying to define themselves on another level.

Annie Bell left her imprint on his music once again, evoking his most powerful poetry yet. In a way, he sang directly to her as she boarded the Panama Limited with Mannish and Mercedes almost forty years before:

People get ready, there's a train a-comin'

You don't need no baggage, you just get on board

All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'

Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord

So people get ready for the train to Jordan

Picking up passengers coast to coast

Faith is the key, open the doors and board 'em

There's hope for all among those loved the most
.

The single shot to number three R&B and number fourteen pop, and the album hit the top spot on the R&B album chart. It was the only Impressions album to rise that high, and the song remains one of their most famous and recognizable works. After “People Get Ready,” my father became the foremost social commentator in pop music. He now understood that the songs of his that contained conviction—dripped with it, actually—tended to be ones that were
about
something.

Music had given Dad power to fight and sometimes defeat the personal challenges that haunted him. He now saw music as a way to combat another source of powerlessness in his life—being a Negro in America. Only this time, everyone could benefit from his fight.

Songs like “People Get Ready” and “Keep On Pushing” didn't come from his head whole cloth, though. Rather, they were works of journalism, expressing the thoughts, feelings, and actions of his community in a way the evening news never could. “I was observing things, what happened
politically, what was in the paper, what was on television,” he said. “Asking what things were wrong that oughta be right.”

As the movement inspired my father to create these songs, he also inspired it. “‘People Get Ready' was one that we used,” said Andrew Young, one of King's partners. “None of us had great voices, but this was music that everybody could sing. You couldn't do Curtis Mayfield's falsetto, but we had kids who could. He was always one of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Shortly after the song became a hit, Chicago churches also began using “People Get Ready” in their services. Some churches changed the final couplet, “You don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord,” to “Everybody wants freedom, this I know.”

People Get Ready
featured lighter fare as well. “Woman's Got Soul,” a great party/love song, charted at number nine R&B. “Can't Work No Longer” hit number six R&B later in the year for Billy Butler, and “We're in Love,” “Get Up and Move,” and “Just Another Dance” all had upbeat rhythms and simple messages about young love.

But as catchy as they were, these songs didn't approach the effect Dad's message music had on his fans. “I can remember [‘People Get Ready'] just making people listen,” he said. “It was so different from what was looked upon as a hit.” He now knew his greatest strength as a songwriter came from the strength of his soul. After “People Get Ready,” his fans expected him to put something heavy on their minds, and he embraced the role. “I'm not totally about being just an entertainer,” he said. “It means a little bit more to me than that.”

After the release, the Impressions began two months of constant touring and television appearances. For some reason, when they appeared on Dick Clark's
Where the Action Is
, they lip-synched “People Get Ready” as they rode a pleasure boat in Los Angeles's MacArthur Park. The visual clashed with the song's somber tone, but it was good exposure nonetheless.

On tour, “People Get Ready” added tremendous weight to the Impressions' style of performing. “When we came out, it was like we
were in church, that's how the audience turned over,” my father said. “They could just be screaming and hollering and getting down and boogieing with one artist, but when the Impressions came out, they would respectfully be quiet.”

Sometimes, other artists on the bills would exit the stage mystified at the Impressions' static power. Fred said, “We did a lot of shows with James Brown, Jackie Wilson, and they said, ‘Good Lord, you cats come back just like you went onstage.' James Brown said, ‘Man, how can y'all go out there and don't sweat and don't do nothing but just sing and the people just go crazy? I have to go out there and work my butt off.' But, we had to rely on our voices because we couldn't dance.”

Perhaps no one underscored how little the Impressions moved onstage better than Otis Redding. “We were doing a show with him at the Regal Theatre in Chicago,” Fred recalled. “Otis came on before we did, and the stage was dirty. He was out there stompin', and sweatin', and stompin', and dust was flyin' all up, and when he was coming off, we were standing in the wings getting ready to come on behind him. He had dirt all up on his pants. It looked like he had been swimming. When he got to us, he looked at us, and we were nice and clean, and he said, ‘Man, [you're] the only group I know that can do a show here for a whole week and don't have to change their shirt.'”

As my father said about his guitar playing, when you can't do something, you find a way not to need it. The Impressions couldn't dance. Instead, they relied on dazzling harmonies and stone-heavy messages to get over.