Episode 124: “People Get Ready” by the Impressions

A History of Folk Music in 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 124

People Get Ready

by the Impressions

A couple of episodes ago, we had a look at one of the first classic protest songs of the soul genre.

Today, we're going to look at how Sam Cooke's baton was passed on to another generation of soul singer-songwriters, and one of the greatest songwriters of that generation.

We're going to look at the early career of Curtis Mayfield and at People Get Ready by the Impressions.

A quick note before I start this one.

There is no way in this episode of avoiding dealing with the fact that the Impression's first hit with a Curtis Mayfield lead vocal has, in its title, a commonly used word for Romani people beginning with G, that many of those people regard as a slur, while others embrace the term for themselves.

I've thought long and hard about how to deal with this, and the compromise I've come up with is that I will use excerpts from the song, which will contain that word, but I won't use the word myself.

I'm not happy with that compromise, but it's the best I can do.

It's unfortunate that that word turns up a lot in music in the period I'm covering.

It's basically impossible to avoid.

Anyway, on with the show.

Curtis Mayfield is one of those musicians who this podcast will, almost by definition, underserve.

My current plan is to do a second episode on him, but if this was a thousand song podcast, he would have a lot more than just two episodes.

He was one of the great musical forces of the 60s and 70s, and listeners to the Patreon bonus episodes will already have come across him several times before, as he was one of those musicians who becomes the centre of a whole musical scene, writing and producing for most of the other soul musicians to come out of Chicago in the late 50s and early 60s.

Mayfield grew up in Chicago in the kind of poverty that is, I hope, unimaginable to most of my listeners.

He had to become the man of the house from age five, looking after his younger siblings as his mother went out looking for work, as his father abandoned his family, moved away, and changed his name.

His mother was on welfare for much of the time, and Mayfield's siblings have talked about how their special Christmas meal often consisted of cornbread and syrup, and they lived off beans, rice, and maybe a scrap of chicken neck every two weeks.

They were so hungry so often that they used to make a game of it, drinking water until they were full, and then making sloshing noises with their bellies, laughing at the making noises other than rumbling.

But while his mother was poor, Mayfield saw that there was a way to escape from poverty.

Specifically, he saw it in his paternal grandmother, the Reverend A.

B.

Mayfield, a spiritualist priest, who was the closest thing to a rich person in his life.

For those who don't know what spiritualism is, it's one of the many new religious movements that sprouted up in the northeastern US in the mid to late 19th century, like the Holiness Movement, which became Pentecostalism, the New Thought, Christian Science, Mormonism, and the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Spiritualists believe, unlike mainstream Christianity, that it is possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead, and that those spirits can provide information about the afterlife and about the nature of God and angels.

If you've ever seen, either in real life or in a fictional depiction, a medium communicating with spirits through a seance, that's spiritualism.

There are numbers of splinter spiritualist movements, and the one Reverend Mayfield, and most black American spiritualists at this time, belonged to, was one that used a lot of elements of Pentecostalism and couched its teachings in the Bible.

To an outside observer not conversant with the theology, it might seem no different from any other black church of the period, other than having a woman in charge.

But most other churches would not have been funded by their presiding minister's winnings from illegal gambling, as she claimed to have the winning numbers in the local numbers racket come to her in dreams, and won often enough that people believed her.

Reverend Mayfield's theology also incorporated elements from the Nation of Islam, which at that time was growing in popularity, and was based in Chicago.

Chicago was also the home of gospel music.

It was where Sister Rosetta Tharpe had got her start, and where Mahalia Jackson and Thomas Dorsey and the Soul Stirvers were all based.

And so, of course, Reverend Mayfield's Church got its own gospel quartet, the Northern Jubilee Singers.

They modelled themselves explicitly on the soul-stirvers, who at the time were led by Sam Cook.

Jesus gave me water,

Jesus gave me water.

I wanna let his praises swell.

Jesus gave me water,

Jesus gave me water,

Jesus gave me water.

and I was not in the well.

Well, there was a woman from Samaria, came to the well to get some water.

There she met a stranger who did a story.

Curtis desperately wanted to join the Northern Jubilee Singers, and particularly admired their lead singer, Jerry Butler, as well as being a huge fan of their inspiration, Sam Cook.

But he was too young.

He was eight years old, and the group members were twelve and thirteen, an incommensurable gap at at that age.

So Curtis couldn't join the Jubilee singers, but he kept trying to perform, and not just with gospel.

As well as gospel, Chicago was also the home of Electric Blues, being where Chess Records was based, and young Curtis Mayfield was surrounded by the music of people like Muddy Waters.

We all are rollin' out, thumm,

cried the whole night long

Well I rollin' out, thumm,

cry the whole night long

And so, as well as singing gospel songs, he started singing and playing the blues, inspired by Waters, Little Walter, and other chess acts.

His first instrument was the piano, and young Curtis found that he naturally gravitated to the black keys.

He liked the sound of those best, and didn't really like playing the white keys.

I won't get into the music theory too much here, but the black keys on a piano make what is called a pentatonic scale, a five note scale that is actually the basis for most folk music forms, whether Celtic folk, Indian traditional music, the blues, bluegrass, Chinese traditional music.

Pentatec scales have been independently invented by almost every culture, and you might think of them as the natural music, what people default to.

The black notes on the piano make that scale in the key of F sharp.

The notes in that are F sharp, G sharp, A sharp, C sharp, and D sharp.

When young Curtis found a guitar in his grandmother's closet, he didn't like the way it sounded.

If you strum the open strings of a guitar, they don't make a chord.

Well, every combination of notes is a chord, but they don't make one most people think of as pleasant.

The standard guitar tuning is E-A-D-G-B-E.

Little Curtis didn't like this sound, so he re-tuned the guitar to F sharp, A sharp, C sharp, F sharp, A sharp, F sharp, notes from the chord of F sharp, and all of them black keys on the piano.

Now, tuning a guitar to open chords is a fairly standard thing to do.

Guitarists as varied as Keith Richards, Steve Cropper, and Dolly Parton tune their guitars to open chords.

But doing it to F sharp is something that pretty much only Mayfield ever did, and it meant his note choices were odd ones.

He would later say with pride that he used to love it when other guitarists picked up his guitar, because no matter how good they were, they couldn't play on his instrument.

He quickly became extremely proficient as a blues guitarist, and his guitar playing soon led the Northern Jubilee singers to reconsider having him in the band.

By the time he was 11, he was a member of the group, and travelling with them to gospel conventions all over the US.

But he had his fingers in multiple musical pies.

He formed a blues group, who would busk outside the pool hall where his uncle was playing, and he also formed a doo-wop group, the Alphatones, who became locally popular.

Jerry Butler, the Jubilee Singer's Lead Vocalist, had also joined a doo-wop group, a group called the Roosters, who had moved up to Chicago from Chattanooga.

Butler was convinced that to make the Roosters stand out, they needed a guitarist like Mayfield, but Mayfield at first remained uninterested.

He already had his own group, the Alphatones.

Butler suggested that Mayfield should rehearse with both groups, three days a week each, and then stick with the group that was better.

Soon Mayfield found himself a full-time member of the Roosters.

In 1957, when Curtis was 15, the group entered a talent contest at a local school, headlined by the Medallionaires, a locally popular group who had released a single on Mercury, Magic Moonlight.

Magic moonlight.

Here my piece.

Keep my baby

in love with me.

Yes, and

I

can make her mind too.

The medallionaire's manager, Eddie Thomas, had been around the music industry since he was a child.

His stepfather had been the great blues pianist Big Macio Merriweather, who had made records like Worried Life Blues.

It hurts me so bad

for us to part,

but someday, baby,

I ain't gonna worry my life anymore.

Thomas hadn't had any success in the industry yet, but at this talent contest, the roosters did a close harmony version of Sam Cook's You Send Me, and Thomas decided that they had potential, especially Mayfield and Butler.

He signed them to a management contract, but insisted they change their name.

They cast around for a long time to find something more suitable, and eventually decided on the Impressions, because they'd made such an impression on Thomas.

The group were immediately taken by Thomas on a tour of the large indie labels, and at each one they sang a song that members of the group had written, which was inspired by a song called Open Our Eyes by the Gospel Clefs.

That we

may

see

to fall

Herman Lubinsky at Savoy liked the song, and suggested that Jerry speak sing it, which was a suggestion the group took up, but he passed on them.

So did Ralph Bassett King.

Mercury Records gave them some session work, but weren't able to sign the group themselves.

The session was with the big band singer Eddie Howard, singing back in vocals on a remake of My Last Goodbye, a song he'd recorded multiple times before.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to track down a copy of that recording, The Infessions First, only Howard's other recordings of the song.

Eventually, the group got the interest of a tiny label called Bandera, whose owner, Vine Wazinski, was interested, but she had to get the approval of Vijay Records, the larger label that distributed Bandera's records.

VJ was a very odd label.

It was one of a tiny number of black-owned labels in America at the time, and possibly the biggest of them, and it's interesting to compare them to Chess Records, which was based literally across the road.

Both put out R ⁇ B records, but Chess was white-owned and specialised in hardcore Chicago electric blues, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Little Walter, and so on.

Vijay, on the other hand, certainly put out its fair share of that kind of music, but they also put out a lot of much smoother doo-wop and early soul, and they would have their biggest hits a few years after this, not with blues artists, but with the Four Seasons, and with their licensing of British records by Frank Arfield and the Beatles.

Both Vijay and chess were aiming at a largely black market, but black owned Vijay was much more comfortable with white pop acts than white-owned chess.

Mazinski set up an audition with Calvin Carter, the head of A ⁇ R at Vijay, and selected the material the group were to perform for Carter, rather corny songs the group were not at all comfortable with.

They ran through that repertoire, and Carter said they sounded good, but didn't they have any originals?

They played a couple of originals, and Carter wasn't interested in those.

Then Carter had a thought, did they have any songs they felt ashamed of playing for him?

Something that they didn't normally do.

They did.

They played that song that the group had written, the one based on Open Our Eyes.

It was called For Your Precious Love, and Carter immediately called in another group, the Spaniels, who were favourites of the Impressions, and had had hits with records like Good Night, Sweetheart, Good Night.

Well, it's time to go.

I hate to leave you, but I really must say

good night, sweetheart.

Good night.

Carter insisted on the impressions singing their song for the Spaniels, and Butler, in particular, was very worried.

He assumed that Carter just wanted to take their song and give it to the bigger group.

But after they played the song again, the Spaniels all enthused about how great the impressions were and what a big hit the impressions were going to have with the song.

They realised that Carter just really liked them and the song and wanted to show them off.

The group went into the studio and recorded half a dozen takes of For Your Precious Love, but none of them came off correctly.

Eventually Carter realised what the problem was.

Mayfield wasn't a member of the musicians musicians' union, and so Carter had hired session guitarists, but they couldn't play the song the way Mayfield did.

Eventually Carter got the guitarists to agree to take the money, not play, and not tell the union if he got Mayfield to play on the track instead of them.

After that, they got it in two takes.

When it came out, the record caused a major problem for the group because they discovered when they saw the label that it wasn't credited to The Impressions, but to Jerry Butler and the Impressions.

The label had decided that they were going to follow the strategy that had worked for so many acts before, put out records credited to Singer and Group, and then, if they were successful, develop that into two separate acts.

To his credit, Butler immediately insisted that the record company get the label reprinted, but Vijay said that wasn't something they could do.

It was too late.

The record was going out as Jerry Butler and the Impressions, and that was an end to it.

The group were immediately put on the promotional circuit.

There was a rumour that Roy Hamilton, the star who had had hits with Unchained Melody and Ebbtide, was going to put out a cover version, as the song was perfectly in his style, and so the group needed to get their version known before he could cut his cover.

They travelled to Philadelphia, where they performed for the DJ Georgie Woods.

We talked about Woods briefly last episode.

He was the one who would later coined the term Blue Eyed Soul to describe the Righteous Brothers, and Woods was also the person who let Dick Clark know what the important black records were, so Clark could feature them on his show.

Woods started to promote the record, and suddenly Jerry Butler and the impressions were huge.

For Your Precious Love made number three on the RB charts, and number eleven on the pop charts.

Their next session produced another hit, Come Back, My Love, although that only made the RB top 30, and was nowhere near as big a hit.

That would be the last time the original lineup of the Impressions would record together.

Shortly afterwards, before a gig in Texas, Jerry Butler called the President of the record label to sort out a minor financial problem.

Once the problem had been sorted out, the President put the phone down, but then one of the other Impressions, Arthur Brooks, asked if he could have a word.

Butler explained that the other person had hung up, and Brooks went ballistic, saying that Butler thought he was in charge and thought that he could do all the talking for the group.

Well, if he thought that, he could do all the singing too.

Brooks and his brother Richard weren't going on stage.

Sam Gooden said he wasn't going on either.

He'd been an original rooster with the Brooks brothers before Butler had joined the group, and he was siding with them.

That left Curtis Mayfield.

Mayfield said he was still going on stage, because he wanted to get paid.

The group's solidarity having crumbled, Gooden changed his mind and said he might as well go on with them, so Butler, Mayfield and Gooden went on as a trio.

Butler noticed that the audience didn't notice a difference.

They literally didn't know the Brooks Brothers existed, and that was the point at which he decided to go solo.

The Impressions continued without Butler, with Mayfield, Gooden and the Brooks Brothers recruiting Fred Cash, who had sung with the Roosters when they were still in Tennessee.

Mayfield took over the lead vocals, and soon started attracting the same resentment that Butler had.

VJ dropped the impressions, and they started looking round for other labels, and working whatever odd jobs they could.

Mayfield did get some work from Vijay though, working as a session player on records by people like Jimmy Reid.

There's some question about which sessions Mayfield actually played.

I've seen conflicting information in different sessionographies.

But it's at least possible that Mayfield's playing on Reid's most famous record, Baby What You Want Me To Do.

You got me running,

you got me hiding,

you got me running hide, hide, running anywhere you wanna let it roll.

Yeah,

yeah,

yeah.

You got me done what you want me.

Baby, why you wanna let me roll?

And one of Mayfield's friends, a singer called Major Lance, managed to get himself a one-off single deal with Mercury Records after becoming a minor celebrity as a dancer on a TV show.

Mayfield wrote that one single, though it wasn't a hit.

Someone else who wasn't having hits was Jerry Butler.

By late 1960, it had been two years since For Your Precious Love, and Butler hadn't made the Hot 100 in that time, though he'd had a few minor RB hits.

He was playing the Chitlin circuit, and in the middle of a tour, his guitarist quit.

Butler phoned Mayfield, who had just received a $400 tax bill he couldn't pay, a lot of money for an unemployed musician in 1960.

Mayfield immediately joined Butler's band to pay off his back taxes, and he also started writing songs with Butler.

He Will Break Your Heart, a collaboration between the two, with Calvin Carter also credited, made the top 10 on the pop chart and number one on the RB chart.

He don't love you

like I love you.

If he did, he wouldn't break your heart.

He don't love you

like I

love you.

He's trying

to

Even more important for Mayfield than writing a top 10 hit, though, was his experience playing for Butler at the Harlem Apollo.

Not because of the shows themselves, but because playing a residency in New York allowed him to hang out at the Turf, a restaurant near the Brill building where all the songwriters would hang out.

Or, more specifically, where all the poorer songwriters would hang out.

The Turf did roast beef sandwiches for 50 cents, if you ate standing at the counter rather than seated at a table, and it also had 20 pay phones, so all those songwriters who didn't have their own offices would do their business from the phone booths.

Mayfield would hang out there to learn the secrets of the business, and that meant he learned the single most important lesson there is.

Keep your own publishing.

These writers, some of whom had written many hit songs, were living off $25 advances, while the publishing companies were making millions.

Mayfield also discovered that Sam Cook, the man he saw as the model for how his career should go, owned his own publishing company.

So he did some research, found out that it didn't actually cost anything to start up a publishing company, and started his own, Kurtom, named as a portmanteau with his forename and the surname of Eddie Thomas, the Impressions manager.

While the Impressions career was in the doldrums, Thomas, too, had been working for Butler, as his driver and valet, and he and Mayfield became close, sharing costs and hotel rooms in order to save money.

Mayfield not only paid his tax bill, but by cutting costs everywhere he could, he saved up a thousand dollars, which he decided to use to record a song he'd written specifically for The Impressions, not for Butler.

This is the song I mentioned at the beginning with the potential slur in the title.

If you don't want to hear that, skip forward 30 seconds.

Now, a lovely woman emotion,

with hair as dark as night.

Her eyes were like that of a cat and the dog.

She had hypnotized

me with love.

She was a gypsy woman.

She was a gypsy woman.

That track got the impression signed to ABC Paramount Records, and it made the top 20 on the pop charts and sold half a million copies, thanks once again to promotion from Georgie Woods.

But once again, the follow-ups flopped badly, and the Brooks brothers quit the group, because they wanted to be doing harder-edged R ⁇ B in the mould of Little Richard, Hank Ballard, and James Brown, not the soft melodic stuff that Mayfield was writing.

The Impressions continued as a three-piece group, and Mayfield would later say that this had been the making of them.

A three-part harmony group allowed for much more spontaneity and trading of parts, for the singers to move freely between lead and backing vocals and to move into different parts of their ranges, where when they had been a five-piece group, everything had been much more rigid, as if a singer moved away from his assigned part, he would find himself clashing with another singer's part.

But as the group were not having hit, Mayfield was still looking for other work, and he found it at OK Records, which was going through something of a boom in this period thanks to the producer Carl Davis.

Davis took Mayfield on as an associate producer and right-hand man, primarily in order to get him as a guitarist, but Mayfield was also a valuable talent scout, backing vocalist, and especially songwriter.

Between 1963 and 1965, working with Davis and arranger Johnny Pate, Mayfield wrote and played on a huge number of RB hits for OK,

including It's All Over by Walter Jackson.

It's all over.

It's all over now.

How do I tell her

I'm in love with you?

Gonna be good times for Gene Chandler.

I bet it pulls up in a Cadillac

Driving slow with the top left back.

Patiently, the girls they wait for their hair that date.

And it's gonna be good times.

It's gonna be good times.

It's gonna be good times,

good times

and a whole string of hits for Jerry Butler's brother Billy and his group, The Enchanters, starting with Gotta Get Away.

I've got to get away from you, baby.

I've got to get away from you right now.

I've got

But the real commercial success came from Mayfield's old friend Major Lance, who Mayfield got signed to OK.

Lance had several minor hits written by Mayfield, but his big success came with the song that Mayfield had written for The Impressions, but decided against recording with them, as it was a novelty dance song and he didn't think that they should be doing that kind of material.

The Impressions sang backing vocals on Major Lance's The Monkey Time, written by Mayfield, which became a top ten pop hit.

There's a place right across town, whenever you're ready,

where people gather round whenever they're ready

And then the music begins to play

You feel the blue coming on its way Are you ready?

Are you ready?

Will you get your cause I've got a plan for the money

Mayfield would write several more hits for Major Lance

including the one that became his biggest hit um um um um um um which went top five pop and made number one on the RB charts.

Walking through the park,

it wasn't quite dark.

There was my man sitting on a bench

out of the crowd as his head lowly bowed.

He just bought and it made no sense.

He just go mm mm-mm-mm-hmm mm mm-mm.

So Mayfield was making hits for other people at a furious rate, but he was somehow unable to have hits with his own group.

He was still pushing the impressions, but they had to be a weekend commitment.

The group would play gigs all over the country at weekends, but Monday through Friday Mayfield was in the studio cutting hits for other people, and he was also trying to keep up a relationship, not only with his wife and first child, but with the woman who would become his second wife, with whom he was cheating on his first.

He was young enough that he could just about keep this up.

He was only twenty at this point, though he was already a veteran of the music industry, but it did mean that the Impressions were a lower priority than they might have been.

At least they were until, in August 1963, between those two huge major lance hits, Curtis Mayfield finally wrote another big hit for the Impressions, their first in their new three-piece lineup.

Everyone could tell It's Alright was a hit, and Gene Chandler begged to be allowed to record it, but Mayfield insisted that his new song was for his group.

It's Alright went to number four on the pop chart and number one RB, and this time the group didn't mess up the follow-up.

Their next two singles, Talking About My Baby and I'm So Proud, both made the pop top 20, and the Impressions were now stars.

Mayfield also took a trip to Jamaica around this time with Carl Davis to produce an album of Jamaican artists titled The Real Jamaica Scar, featuring acts like Lord Creator and Jimmy Cliff.

But Mayfield was also becoming increasingly politically aware.

As the civil rights movement in the US was gaining steam, It was also starting to expose broader systemic problems that affected black people in the North, not just the south.

In Chicago, while black people had been able to vote for decades, and indeed were a substantial political power bloc, all that this actually meant in practice was that a few powerful self-appointed community leaders had a vested interest in keeping things as they were.

Segregation still existed.

In 1963, around the time that It's All Right came out, there was a school strike in the city, where nearly a quarter of a million children refused to go to school.

Black schools were so overcrowded that it became impossible for children to learn there.

But rather than integrate the schools and let black kids go to the less crowded white schools, the head of public education in Chicago decided instead to make the children go to school in shifts, so some were going ridiculously early in the morning, while others were having to go to school in the evening.

And there were more difficult arguments going on around segregation among black people in Chicago.

The issues in the South seemed straightforward in comparison.

No black person wanted to be lynched or to be denied the right to vote.

But in Chicago there was the question of integrating the two musicians union chapters in the city.

Some black proponents of integration saw merging the two union chapters as a way for black musicians to get the opportunity to play lucrative sessions for advertising jingles and so on, which only went to white players.

But a vocal minority of musicians were convinced that the upshot of integrating the unions would be that black players would still be denied those jobs, but white players would start getting some of the soul and RB sessions that only black players were playing, and thought that the end result would be that white people would gentrify those areas of music and culture where black people had carved out spaces for themselves, while still denying black people the opportunity to move into the white spaces.

Mayfield was deeply, deeply invested in the civil rights movement, and the wider discourse as more radical voices started to gain strength in the movement.

And he was particularly inspired by his hero, Sam Cook, recording A Change Is Gonna Come.

As the rhetoric of the civil rights movement was so deeply rooted in religious language, it was natural that Mayfield would turn to the gospel music he'd grown up on for his own first song about these issues, Keep on Pushing.

yeah.

Keep on

pushing

now, maybe someday

I'll reach that higher goal.

I know

I can make it

with just a little bit of soul.

That became another huge hit, making the top 10 on the pop chart and number one on the RB chart.

It's instructive to look at reactions to the Impressions and to Mayfield's sweet melodic singing.

White audiences were often dismissive of the Impressions, believing they were attempting to sell out to white people and were therefore not black enough.

A typical reaction is that of Arnold Shaw, the white music writer, who in 1970 referred to the Impressions as Oreos, a derogatory term for people who are black on the outside, outside, white inside.

Oddly, though, black audiences seem not to have recognised the expertise of elderly white men on who was black enough, and despite white critics' protestations, continued listening to and buying the Impressions records, and incorporating Mayfield's songs into their activism.

For example, Sing for Freedom, a great oral history-come songbook, which collects songs sung by civil rights activists, collected contemporaneously by folklorists, has no fewer than four Impressions songs included, in lightly adapted versions, as sung by the Chicago Freedom Movement, the group led by Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, and others, who campaigned for an end to housing segregation in Chicago.

It quotes Jimmy Collier, a black civil rights activist and folk singer, saying: There's a rock and roll group called the Impressions, and we call them Movement Fellows, and we try to sing a lot of their songs.

Songs like Keep on Pushing, I've been trying,

I'm so proud, it's gonna be a long, long winter, people get ready, there's a trainer coming, there's a meeting over yonder, really speak to the situation a lot of us find ourselves in.

I mention this discrepancy because this is something that comes up throughout music history.

White people dismissing black people as not being black enough and trying to appeal to whites, even as black audiences were embracing those artists in preference to the artists who had white people's seal of approval as being authentically black.

I mention this because I am myself a white man, and it is very important for me to acknowledge that I will make similar errors when talking about black culture, as I am here.

Keep on pushing was the impression's first political record, but by no means the most important.

In 1965 the civil rights movement seemed to be starting to unravel, and there were increasing ruptures between the hardliners, who would go on to form what would become the Black Power Movement, and the more moderate older generation.

These ruptures were only exacerbated by the murder of Malcolm X, the most powerful voice on the radical side.

Mayfield was depressed by this fragmentation and wanted to write a song of hope, one that brought everyone together.

To see the roots of the song Mayfield came up with, we have to go all the way back to episode 5, and to this strain, the old gospel song which Rosetta Tharpe had made famous.

This train, you know that.

I said, this train

don't pull no winkers.

This train.

Brother, this train

don't pull no winkers.

No crap shooter and no whiskey drink.

The image of the train leading to freedom had always been a powerful one in black culture, dating back to the Underground Railroad, the network of people who had helped enslaved people flee their abusers and get away to countries where they could be free.

It was also a particularly potent image for black people in the northern cities, many of whom had travelled there by train from the south, or whose parents had.

Mayfield took the old song and built a new song around it.

His melody is closer than it might seem to that of this train, but has a totally different sound and feeling, one of gentle hope rather than fervent excitement, and there's a difference of emphasis in the lyrics too.

This train, as befits a a singer like Tharpe, who belonged to a Pentecostal holiness sect, which taught the need for upright conduct at all times, is mostly a list of those sinners who won't be allowed on the train.

Mayfield, by contrast, had been brought up in a spiritualist church, and one of the nine affirmations of spiritualism is: We affirm that the doorway to reformation is never closed against any soul here or hereafter.

Mayfield's song does talk about how there ain't no room for the hopeless sinner whom would hurt all mankind just to save his own.

But the emphasis is on how there's hope for all among those loved the most, and how you don't need no baggage and don't need no ticket.

It's a song which is fundamentally inclusive, offering a vision of hope and freedom in which all are welcome.

believe me now?

Have pity on those whose

chances grow thinner, for there's no hiding place

against the kingdom's throne.

So people get ready,

there's a trainer coming.

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

The song quickly became one of the most important songs to the civil rights movement.

Dr.

King called it the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement, as well as becoming yet another big hit.

We will continue to explore the way Mayfield and the Impressions reacted to, were inspired by, and themselves inspired black political movements when we look at them again, and their political importance was extraordinary.

But this is a podcast about music, and so I'll finish with a note about their musical importance.

As with many R and B acts, The Impressions were massive in Jamaica, and they toured there in 1966.

In the front row, when they played the Carib Theatre in Kingston, were three young men who had recently formed a group which they had explicitly modelled on the Impressions and their three-part harmonies.

That group had even taken advantage of Jamaica's non-existent copyright laws to incorporate a big chunk of People Get Ready into one of their own songs, which was included on their first album.

Beyond those

gross dealers, there ain't no idea,

yes.

One love to hear my fingers.

One of them,

let's join together, and I'll feel alright.

One love, a lot of mercy.

Let's join

Bob Marley and the Wailers would soon become a lot more than an impressions sound-alike group.

But that, of course, is a story for a future episode.

A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon.

Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast.

This week's is on I'm Henry VIII I Am by Hermann's Hermits.

Visit patreon.com slash AndrewHickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month.

A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available.

Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favourite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes.

This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser.

Visit 500songs.com.

That's 500 the numbers songs.com

to read transcript and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here.

If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast.

Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves.

Thank you very much for listening.