Twisted Tales: Stage Accident Paralyzes Curtis Mayfield's Body but Not His Spirit

Posted on Sep 25th 2009 5:00PM by James Sullivan
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Curtis Mayfield sang his last album one line at a time, lying flat on his back. It was the only way the great soul singer could get enough air into his lungs.

In his last years, everyday life was a monumental struggle for the most relentlessly positive voice of R&B music, whose long string of gospel-tinged hits ('People Get Ready,' 'Keep On Pushing,' 'We're a Winner') provided the soundtrack for the civil rights movement of the 1960s. At the age of 48, he'd been paralyzed from the neck down in a freak accident at an outdoor concert honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

Curtis Mayfield was a kid from the Cabrini Green projects in Chicago when he dropped out of high school to join a vocal group known as the Roosters, who soon changed their name to the Impressions. When singer Jerry Butler left for a solo career, the young Mayfield became the group's driving force, hitting the Top 20 with 'Gypsy Woman,' 'It's All Right' and, increasingly, songs that directly addressed the growing civil rights movement. When the blaxploitation films of the early 1970s began influencing black popular music, Mayfield's classic contribution, 'Super Fly,' brought a sense of moral outrage to the genre, with songs ('Pusherman,' 'Freddie's Dead') that were critical of the glamorized drug culture.

Though his career faltered in the age of disco, Mayfield was still a draw by the time of his 1990 appearance in Brooklyn, part of a municipally sponsored weekly summer music series in honor of Dr. King. The opening act was fellow 1970s R&B hitmakers Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, whose former singer, Teddy Pendergrass, had been paralyzed in a car accident in 1982.

Just moments after Mayfield took the temporary stage at Wingate Field in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East Flatbush, an unexpected gust of wind toppled the heavy lighting scaffold overhead. It was "like a mini-tornado," recalled the state legislator who organized the concert series. Six people, including three crew members and a 12-year-old girl, were treated for injuries, but it was Mayfield who took the brunt of the collapse. The blow broke his neck, paralyzing him from the neck down. The following week, thousands of people attending the next concert signed a huge get-well card for the singer.

Unable to play guitar, barely able to sing, it took Mayfield six years to release one last album, 'New World Order.' Diabetes brought on by his paralysis eventually necessitated the amputation of one of his legs. "It's a life-or-death situation almost every minute of the day," the singer told the New York Times.

Mayfield was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. Four years later, he was unable to attend the ceremony for his election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He died in December 1999.

Over time, he once explained, his songs had evolved from the specific hopes of the civil rights movement to "the way we as all people deal with our lives." For his last album, the struggle was constant, but he never stopped facing it. "Whenever life pulls you down," he sang, "you just get back up and hold your ground."