King Curtis

In my pantheon of male soul greats the list would include Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, Bobby Womack and Curtis Mayfield. Marvin is first having produced the two greatest soul albums in history but behind him, and only just, comes Curtis Mayfield. I say this because I have just discovered some of the music that Curtis produced (but didn't perform himself)from the '60's and '70's. The Curtom Soul Compilations are great but I cannot recommend enough The Five Stairsteps - a wonderful, doo-wop inspired soul vocal group that Curtis put together in his spare time in the sixties. He had music dripping from every pore of his body then and produced brilliance almost at will.

I watched a fantastic programme on BBC2 a few years ago (I note that BBC2 have given up on this sort of programme). It featured Curtis just after he had been rendered quadraplegic by collapsed rigging on a stage while performing. Curtis was teaching himself to sing again and to play the guitar and through amazing effort he did it. But we all doubted if he could ever re-create anything near in quality to that which he had done before. The world is full of once great musicians who keep on churning out albums that are worthy but dull efforts (Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and many others). But Curtis suddenly came out with 'New World Order',a beautiful album that stood up superbly against his other work. Sheer force of will had got him back. He died within a year of its release. I sensed that he had decided that the time to go would be after he had taught himself to sing again and produced an album that said to the world that he had made it back. A great guy.