The Impressions
Based on Wikipedia: The Impressions
In 1990, a lighting rig fell on Curtis Mayfield during an outdoor concert in Brooklyn, paralyzing him from the neck down. He was fifty-seven years old, and he had spent most of his life as one of the most influential voices in American music—first as the driving force behind the Impressions, then as a solo artist who essentially invented the sound of socially conscious soul. After the accident, he kept recording. He made another album. He won a Grammy Legend Award. He became the rare artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice: once with his group, once on his own. This is a story about persistence, about faith, about a group of singers from Chicago and Chattanooga who made some of the most important music of the civil rights era—and then kept going for sixty years.
From the Roosters to Jerry Butler and the Impressions
The story begins in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where three young men named Sam Gooden, Richard Brooks, and Arthur Brooks formed a vocal group called the Roosters. Doo-wop was the sound of the moment—that style of close-harmony singing that emerged from street corners and barbershops in the 1950s, where groups would gather and blend their voices into something beautiful. The Roosters were part of that tradition, but they hadn't quite found their sound yet.
Then they moved to Chicago.
In Chicago, two more singers joined the group: Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield, who had met while singing in the same church choir. This was 1957, and the fusion of those Chattanooga voices with these Chicago church boys created something new. By 1958, they had a manager named Eddie Thomas, a record deal with Vee-Jay Records, and a new name that would stick: Jerry Butler and the Impressions.
Their first single, "For Your Precious Love," hit the charts immediately. It reached number eleven on the pop charts and number three on the rhythm and blues charts—remarkable success for a debut. The song had that quality that would define the Impressions' best work: a sense of yearning, of emotional depth that transcended the simple love-song formula. Butler's voice floated over the harmonies like a preacher delivering a sermon on tenderness.
But success can be destabilizing. After one more hit, "Come Back My Love," Butler left for a solo career. This could have been the end of the story—another promising vocal group fractured by the gravitational pull of individual ambition.
Instead, it was a beginning.
Curtis Mayfield Takes the Lead
Curtis Mayfield was twenty years old when Jerry Butler left the Impressions. He had been the group's guitarist and a background vocalist. Now he stepped forward as lead singer and, more importantly, as the group's songwriter. Fred Cash, who had actually been an original member of the Roosters before the group's Chicago expansion, returned to fill out the lineup.
Here's what's remarkable about Mayfield: he didn't just write songs for the Impressions. He wrote songs for Jerry Butler too, helping his former bandmate succeed as a solo artist. He used the money from those songwriting royalties to move the Impressions to New York City, where they signed with ABC-Paramount Records in 1961.
Their first single for the new label was "Gypsy Woman." It's a strange, almost mystical song—not the kind of thing you'd expect from a former doo-wop group. Mayfield's falsetto weaves through the arrangement like smoke, singing about a woman who reads fortunes and steals hearts. The song hit number two on the rhythm and blues charts and number twenty on the pop charts, their biggest success yet.
But then the momentum stalled. Follow-up singles failed to match "Gypsy Woman's" magic. Richard and Arthur Brooks, the two remaining Chattanooga originals besides Sam Gooden, left the group in 1962. The Impressions returned to Chicago as a trio: Mayfield, Gooden, and Cash.
This could have been another ending. Instead, they found Johnny Pate.
The Chicago Sound
Johnny Pate was a producer who understood something crucial about the Impressions: they weren't just another vocal group. They had the potential to make music that was richer, more orchestral, more sophisticated than the typical rhythm and blues fare of the era. Working with Pate, the trio developed what would come to be known as the Chicago soul sound—lush string arrangements, complex harmonies, and Mayfield's distinctive guitar work, which used unconventional tunings to create those shimmering, almost harp-like tones.
In 1963, they released "It's All Right."
The song is pure joy. It has a bouncing, irresistible rhythm, with the three voices trading off and harmonizing in a way that makes you want to move. It topped the rhythm and blues charts and reached number four on the pop charts. It sold a million copies. Suddenly, the Impressions weren't just surviving—they were one of the most successful groups in the country.
Music for a Movement
What happened next is what separates the Impressions from dozens of other successful soul groups of the 1960s. Curtis Mayfield started writing songs about something bigger than love and heartbreak.
"Keep on Pushing" came out in 1964. On the surface, it sounds like a gospel song about perseverance through hard times. But listen closer, and you hear something else. The civil rights movement was in full force—the March on Washington had happened the previous summer, the Civil Rights Act was working its way through Congress, and Black Americans were pushing, literally and figuratively, against a system designed to hold them back. Mayfield's song spoke to that struggle without being so explicit that radio stations would refuse to play it.
The song reached the top ten on both the pop and rhythm and blues charts.
Then came "People Get Ready."
If you know one Impressions song, it's probably this one. Released in 1965, it uses the imagery of a train—that great American symbol of freedom and escape—to deliver a message of hope and redemption. "People get ready, there's a train a-coming," Mayfield sings. "You don't need no baggage, you just get on board."
The song draws heavily from gospel music, that tradition of spirituals that had sustained Black Americans through centuries of oppression. But it's not a traditional gospel song. It's something new: a secular hymn for a generation fighting for their rights. The song became an unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement, standing alongside "We Shall Overcome" and "A Change Is Gonna Come" as music that captured the spirit of an era.
"People Get Ready" has been covered by hundreds of artists. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone magazine ranked it the twenty-fourth greatest song of all time. A panel of songwriters and producers that included Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson named it one of the ten best songs ever written.
The Jamaican Connection
Six hundred miles south of Miami, on the island of Jamaica, a young group called the Wailers was paying attention.
The Wailers—Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer—were developing the sound that would eventually become reggae, but in the early 1960s they were working in a style called ska, which was heavily influenced by American rhythm and blues. They studied the Impressions obsessively. They modeled their vocal harmonies on the three-part blend of Mayfield, Gooden, and Cash. They borrowed elements of the group's visual style. They covered multiple Impressions songs, including "Keep On Moving" and "Long Long Winter."
Most significantly, Bob Marley took the melody and much of the lyrical content of "People Get Ready" and transformed it into "One Love." The original Jamaican recordings didn't credit Mayfield—copyright law wasn't strictly enforced for Jamaican recordings at the time—but when the song was released internationally on the 1977 album Exodus, it was titled "One Love/People Get Ready" and gave Mayfield co-authorship credit.
This is how influence works in popular music: a group from Chicago and Chattanooga, singing about the struggle for civil rights in America, inspires a group from Kingston, Jamaica, to create music that would eventually soundtrack liberation movements around the world.
The Message Gets Louder
By the late 1960s, Mayfield was writing songs that were explicitly political. The coded messages of "Keep on Pushing" gave way to the direct statements of "We're a Winner," which hit number one on the rhythm and blues charts in 1968.
"We're a winner / And never let anybody say / Boy, you can't make it / 'Cause a feeble mind is in your way."
Some radio stations refused to play it. They called it too militant. But the song's success proved that audiences were ready for music that addressed the realities of Black life in America without apology or euphemism.
That same year, Mayfield started his own record label, Curtom Records, and moved the Impressions to it. This gave him unprecedented control over the group's sound and message. Over the next two years, they released a string of socially conscious singles: "This Is My Country" (1968), "Choice of Colors" (1969, which hit number one on the rhythm and blues charts), and "Check Out Your Mind" (1970, which reached number three).
"If you had a choice of colors / Which one would you choose, my brothers?" Mayfield asked in "Choice of Colors." It was a direct challenge to internalized racism, to the hierarchies of skin tone that had been used to divide Black communities. This was not subtle music. This was music with a purpose.
Mayfield Departs
In 1970, after the release of the Check Out Your Mind album, Curtis Mayfield left the Impressions to pursue a solo career.
His timing was impeccable. His 1972 soundtrack for the film Super Fly became one of the defining albums of the decade—a concept record about drug dealing in Harlem that somehow managed to critique the very lifestyle it depicted. The title track and "Freddie's Dead" both became major hits. Mayfield went on to score several more films, including Claudine (1974), Sparkle (1976), and A Piece of the Action (1977).
But he didn't abandon the Impressions entirely. He continued to write and produce for them, and they remained on his Curtom label.
Life After Mayfield
Leroy Hutson became the group's new lead singer, but success proved elusive. The magic combination of voices that had defined the Impressions' sound was hard to replicate. Hutson left in 1973.
Then something unexpected happened. New members Ralph Johnson and Reggie Torian joined Sam Gooden and Fred Cash, and the reconstituted Impressions had a genuine comeback. "Finally Got Myself Together (I'm a Changed Man)" hit number one on the rhythm and blues charts in 1974 and crossed over to the pop top twenty. "Same Thing It Took" and "Sooner or Later" both reached number three. In 1975, "First Impressions" became their only British hit, reaching number sixteen in the United Kingdom.
The group left Curtom in 1976 for Cotillion Records and had one more major hit with "Loving Power." After that, the commercial success faded, but the Impressions kept performing. They cycled through various lineups over the decades, with Gooden and Cash as the constants—the two men who had been there since the Roosters days in Chattanooga.
The Accident
August 13, 1990. Wingate Field in Flatbush, Brooklyn. An outdoor concert.
Curtis Mayfield was performing when a lighting rig, weakened by high winds, fell and struck him. He was paralyzed from the neck down. He was forty-eight years old.
What followed is a testament to the man's determination. Despite being unable to move anything below his neck, Mayfield continued making music. He couldn't play guitar anymore, so he worked with collaborators. He couldn't sing standing up, so he recorded lying down, producing vocal takes one line at a time because he could no longer take deep breaths.
His final album, New World Order, came out in 1997. It took four years to make. Reviews were respectful of the achievement even as they acknowledged the limitations imposed by his condition.
The honors accumulated. Grammy Legend Award in 1994. Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. Induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in 1999, making him a double inductee (he had gone in with the Impressions in 1991). Two Grammy Hall of Fame inductions for "People Get Ready" and other works.
Curtis Mayfield died on December 26, 1999, from complications of type 2 diabetes. He was fifty-seven years old.
The Long Goodbye
The Impressions continued without their founder. They were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2003. They performed on PBS specials and tribute concerts. In 2011, they began working with a German manager named DJ Pari, who helped them tour Europe and Asia for the first time.
In July 2013, something remarkable happened: the Impressions released "Rhythm!," their first new single in over thirty years. It was produced by Binky Griptite, guitarist for the Dap-Kings (the band behind Sharon Jones and Amy Winehouse's retro-soul sound), and released on Daptone Records. The song had actually been written by Curtis Mayfield in the mid-1960s and originally recorded by Major Lance. Now, nearly fifty years later, Fred Cash and Sam Gooden finally got to record it themselves.
In 2015, a thirty-year-old singer named Jermaine Purifory, who had competed on American Idol and done session work for the television show Glee, joined as the group's new lead vocalist. He was younger than many of the Impressions' hit songs.
The end came in September 2018. The Impressions embarked on their first—and last—tour of Japan, performing six shows at the Billboard Live venues in Tokyo and Osaka. It was their sixtieth anniversary as a group. After six decades, spanning the entire history of rock and roll, soul music, and beyond, the Impressions retired.
The Roll Call
The years since have brought a steady stream of losses. Sam Gooden, the last active original member, died in Chattanooga in August 2022 at eighty-seven. Richard Brooks, one of the founding Roosters, died in Chattanooga in November 2023 at eighty-three. Jerry Butler, the original lead singer who had left for solo stardom way back in 1958, died in February 2025 from complications of Parkinson's disease. He was eighty-five and the last surviving original member.
Fred Cash, as of this writing, is still alive—the last living link to the classic Impressions lineup of the 1960s.
The Legacy
What do the Impressions mean now, sixty-plus years after "For Your Precious Love" first hit the airwaves?
They were one of the first groups to prove that popular music could carry explicit social messages without sacrificing commercial appeal. Before Curtis Mayfield started writing about Black pride and civil rights, the assumption was that audiences wanted escapism—love songs, dance songs, nothing too challenging. Mayfield showed that people were hungry for music that spoke to their real lives and struggles.
They pioneered the Chicago soul sound, that lush, orchestral approach that influenced everyone from Marvin Gaye to modern neo-soul artists. The specific guitar tunings that Mayfield developed created textures that are still being imitated today.
They proved that a group could survive—and thrive—through massive personnel changes. The Impressions that recorded "Finally Got Myself Together" in 1974 had only one member in common with the Impressions that recorded "People Get Ready" in 1965. And yet the spirit, the sound, and the commitment to meaningful music remained.
Most of all, they left behind songs that continue to resonate. "People Get Ready" has been covered by artists ranging from Rod Stewart to Bruce Springsteen to Aretha Franklin. Its message—that salvation is coming, that you just need to be ready to receive it—speaks to every generation facing struggle and uncertainty.
The train is still coming. You just have to get on board.