Beyond Superfly: Curtis Mayfield and the Black Soundtrack by Mark Anthony Neal
Curtis Mayfield’s soundtracks for Superfly, Claudine, Let’s Do It Again and Sparkle, not only helped establish the format as a viable artistic and commercial platform for Soul artists, but they also align with the most important work of his career as a solo artist and producer.
With a career that spanned 40 years, including a decade-plus of classics with The Impressions, and a celebrated turn as solo vocalist and producer, Curtis Mayfield is most remembered for his soundtrack recording for the film Superfly (1972). The film, directed by the late Gordon Parks, Jr., even more than the classic Shaft, directed by hi father the legendary photographer Gordon Parks, Sr., became a standard bearer for the popular genre of Blaxploitation film in the 1970s; the same can be said about Mayfield’s soundtrack, and a trio of other soundtracks that he produced in the mid-1970s.
Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly was released in July of 1972, nearly a year after Isaac Hayes’s Shaft, and months before Marvin Gaye’s Hard-Bop influenced soundtrack for the largely forgotten film Trouble Man. The albums marked a period when the film soundtrack became a new terrain for Black musical artists to experiment and explore new palettes in the their sound — a moment that largely begins with the soundtrack for Melvin Van Peebles film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), which featured music from a then unknown band called Earth, Wind & Fire.
The iconic “Theme from Shaft” earned Hayes an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1972 and Gaye’s “Trouble Man” became his own theme song for the still unnamed movement of “Afro-Pessimist” thought (“there are only three things that’s for sure, taxes, death and trouble”). Mayfield’s soundtrack, in comparison instigated a shift in the sonics — think of the music of Barry White and Willie Hutch for example — and thematic possibilities of Soul music; Lightnin’ Rod’s Hustlers Convention (the late Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin), is almost unimaginable without the success of Superfly.
In his book Funk: The Music, The People and the Rhythm of the One, Rickey Vincent writes that the “Superfly soundtrack was a turning point in black music, as [Mayfield’s] social consciousness blended in a fluid fashion with the latest hip street styles to identify the decade’s ultimate street hero.” (169) Ironically, Mayfield intended the Superfly soundtrack as a cautionary tale, after he was disturbed by the film’s seeming celebration of the hustling life. Nevertheless the album’s theme song and the infectious “Freddie’s Dead” were the only major pop hits of Mayfield’s solo career.
Perhaps because Superfly the movie was so tethered to Curtis Mayfield the artist, when the singer and producer next worked on a soundtrack it was in the role of producing Gladys Knight & the Pips for the soundtrack to the film Claudine. Gladys Knight and the Pips were on the most successful run on their career; “Neither One of Us” (1973), their last single for Motown, was their most successful to that point, and they followed that up in late 1973 on their new label Buddah Records, with their career defining track “Midnight Train to Georgia”, which was their first song to top the pop the charts. The song was featured on an album, Imagination, that produced two other top-5 Pop singles “I Got to Use My Imagination” and “Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me”.
Claudine (dir. John Berry) was produced at the height of the Blaxploitation film craze, and its focus of the challenges of a single Black mother — not yet the trope we understand her as now — was a refreshing reprieve to tiresome narratives of Black drug lords and Italian Mafia dons fighting over Black real estate. Diahann Carroll earned an Academy Award nomination for the title role, which was initially intended for the late Diana Sands, who bowed out after being diagnosed with cancer. Carroll appeared opposite James Earl Jones, in the role of the good-hearted but ambivalent garbageman Rupert Marshall.
With Mayfield at the helm, Claudine was one of Gladys Knight and the Pips strongest albums of the period, anchored by the Top-5 Pop hit “On and On”. Two of Knight’s most compelling performances are on the ballads, “The Makings of You”, and “To Be Invisible”, which were both tracks, along with the opener “Mr. Welfare”, that Mayfield recorded for himself on his solo album Curtis (1970), Sweet Exorcist (released two months after Claudine), and a later recording Give, Get, Take and Have (1976), respectively. “Make Yours a Happy Home”, which closes the album and the film, may be one of the most joyful moments in all Black film in the 1970s.
Mayfield would release three solo album, including There’s No Place Like America Today (1975), before producing The Staple Singers for the soundtrack to the film Let’s Do It Again. The film was the second in a trilogy of comedies starring Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, who also directed the three films. Unlike Gladys Knight and The Pips, who were ascending when Mayfield collaborated with them, The Staple Singers were on the other side of an unexpected period of crossover success, with iconic Stax recordings like “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There”. With the collapse of Stax in 1975, The Staple Singers signed to Mayfield’s Curtom label, where their only release was the Let’s Do It Again soundtrack.
The sexually suggestive title track, seemed an odd fit for The Staples, whose uplift brand was unimpeachable, but it was their first song to top both the Pop and R&B charts since “I’ll Take You There” was released four years earlier. It would also mark the end of their relevancy as Soul and R&B artists, though Mayfield would produce Mavis Staples’s third solo album A Piece of the Action, which also doubled as the soundtrack for the third of the Cosby/Poitier trilogy.
Having turned down Marvin Yancy and Chuck Jackson’s “This Will Be” the year before — a song that subsequently was the launching pad for Natalie Cole’s career — Aretha Franklin was in the first “slump” or her career in 1976. After working exclusively with Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin throughout her tenure at the label (there was a one-off with Quincy Jones), Franklin went outside the family to work with proven hitmaker, Curtis Mayfield. The resulting album, the soundtrack to the film Sparkle was the last great Soul album of her career. As Franklin’s vocals don’t appear in the film — the film’s lead vocals were handled by Lonette McKee and 17-year-old Irene Cara — the album might more appropriately be described as inspired by the film Sparkle.
Nevertheless, side-A of Sparkle, might be as perfect as any side that Franklin had ever recorded; The title track, “Hooked on Your Love”, and especially “Look In Your Heart” — which Jordin Sparks claims as her own in a 2012 remake of the film — are timeless tributes to Mayfield’s ability to craft songs to the strengths of the artists he worked with. And that includes the standout “Giving Him Something He Can Feel”, which pound-for-pound, might be the best big-ole Soul ballad of Franklin’s career. It is a testament to Franklin’s artistry that when En Vogue covered “Giving Him Something He Can Feel” and “Hooked On Your Love” (Funky Divas, 1992), their song arrangements more closely reflected the film performances and not Ms. Franklin’s.
Mayfield again connected with Franklin on 1978’s Almighty Fire, which history remembers as an unqualified commercial failure; the end of Franklin’s career at Atlantic was essentially cemented with the album. Franklin would not again become a viable pop star until she began to work with Luther Vandross, and in particular Narada Michael Walden in the mid-1980s. Sparkle in many ways was the closing statement on her Atlantic career.
Mayfield would produce only a few other soundtracks after Sparkle; Short Eyes, of which the title track was later sampled by Jay Z on “American Gangster”, the aforementioned A Piece of the Action, and the largely forgotten The Return of Superfly (1990). In a prolific and wildly uneven solo career that spanned from 1970 until the stage accident that effectively ended his career in 1990, the Mayfield soundtracks for Superfly, Claudine, Let’s Do It Again and Sparkle, not only helped establish the format as a viable artistic and commercial platform for Soul artists, but they also align with the most important work of his career as a solo artist and producer.
Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. The author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, both from NYU Press. His next book Save a Seat for Me: Meditations on Black Masculinity and Fatherhood will be published by Simon & Schuster.
