It’s better to say enough than it is to say everything. Sometimes that’s more powerful. Curtis Mayfield knew this better than most.

He had a beautiful voice, a sumptuous, flickering guitar sound, and a line in gospel funk that was full of heart and aflame with hope.

And boy could he write.

He’s not celebrated enough for it, but his words were never less then precise and insightful. His characters are drawn with tender humanity. He sets moods effortlessly. He was all feeling, sharing his fear as well as his love. And he compacts it all down into verse so free and flowing that you barely notice it.

Look at Superfly. Dancing to it might have blinded you to its poetry, the way it defines and deconstructs a murderous mood with devastating economy.

Darkest of night
With the moon shining bright
There’s a set goin’ strong
Lotta things goin’ on
The man of the hour
Has an air of great power
The dudes have envied him for so long

Or Freddie’s Dead — a soliloquy on life’s futility, refracted through the jarring reality of ghetto nihilism.

We’re all built up with progress,
but sometimes I must confess,
we can deal with rockets and dreams,
but reality… what does it mean?
Ain’t nothing said.
‘cause Freddie’s dead.

These are tender, thoughtful words, describing men who are anything but. Mayfield can’t help but show you the humanity. He tells other people’s stories, and elevates himself above the action. He was always good at this, even before the Superfly songs underlined the brilliance of his soundtrack storytelling. Even in The Impressions he was breaking the fourth wall (“let me sing you a song, it won’t take too long, about the young mods’ forgotten story”).

On Superfly he’s the Greek chorus. He propels the story forward, explaining the characters’ motivations and concerns. His music is rich in a dialogue with his audience. Often it mirrors the relationship America’s black community had with its preachers, and even its civil rights figureheads. He advocates power to the people, imploring them to get ready, to find their roots, to move on up, or just to make it right on through the darkness.

His preacherly tendencies conjured dark images, too. He wasn’t afraid to demand more of people, to ask them to arrest our collective decline by imagining underground futures, or by issuing ironic warnings — don’t worry, if there’s hell below, we’re all going to go.

In my view, Mayfield is the under-rated soul superstar. As self-reliant as James Brown, as sweet-sounding as Marvin Gaye, as perceptive as Stevie Wonder. But he wrote better lyrics than any of them. He knew the power of words to provoke, to shame, to galvanise, to energise. Yet he’s nowhere near as feted as the others.

There are so many songs by him I love. But it’s the words of one in particular I want to highlight. It’s a song where he abandons his pedestal and becomes a protagonist. He retains his role as detached reporter, but this time he’s inside the story.

Partly because of that, but also because it’s one he’d told many times before, it’s a story he tells it with even greater economy than usual. It takes the themes of Superfly and Freddie’s Dead and pares down the message to its simplest form. He doesn’t have to say everything. He can say just enough.

And so the song stands as a last warning. One final throw. A focused plea to his listeners. A hymn to wasted life.

That song is Billy Jack.

Billy Jack is slow and sombre, even for Mayfield. It is patient. A full minute passes before the words arrive. Its intro sets the mood: ominous, irresistible, slow-burning. Then Mayfield begins to tease his story out, one slow, inevitably tragic line at a time.

Mayfield plays an ex-con who has a chance meeting as he’s settling back in to a normal life.

Just out Monday, run into a friend
Down the street, down the street, where I live

The lines are sparse, unsentimental, matter-of-fact. The poetry and existentialism of Freddie’s Dead is a long way off. There are stirrings, too, that something’s wrong.

Sad things begin, I could feel from within
From the message, from the message, he had to give

The storyteller’s disquiet makes us uncomfortable. But we still don’t know what’s wrong. The conversation between two old friends — seeing each other for the first time in a while — is already dominated by something bad.

Then we get to it:

About a buddy of mine, he run out of time,
His life run out of time
Somebody past noon, shot across the room
And now the man no longer lives

A third friend is dead.

“His life run out of time” is just the first and most euphemistic way we hear it. “The man no longer lives,” two lines later, makes it clear. This is another song about a fast life cut short by a futile death.

We hear about a “body sprawled out, there on the floor”. He bemoans too the “sad bloody mess, shot all up in the chest” in the final verse. In returning to the scene over and over, it’s as if Mayfield is throwing everything at us — look where this gets us, he says. Don’t look away. There is no style here, no sense of cool. “Can’t be no fun” he sings, “to be shot, shot with a handgun.”

Nothing to aspire to. Just stupid, inevitable death.

The sense of crushing inevitability is there in the frequent repetitions and reiterations that pepper the lyrics.

Down the street, down the street

From the message, from the message

He run out of time, his life run out of time

To be shot, shot with a handgun

Shot all up in the chest, shot in his chest

Such is Billy Jack’s descent reinforced. Another half-repetition signals that the people who knew Billy Jack knew this was inevitable too.

Too bad about him, too sad about him
Don’t get me wrong, the man is gone
But it’s a wonder he lived this long

Two friends rapping on the corner. Respectful, but telling the story in all its gory detail. Seems they knew him from way back. His demise is no surprise.

Up in the city they called him Boss Jack
But down home he was an alley cat
Ah, didn’t care nothing about being Black
Oh, Billy Jack

A smalltime crook who hit it big. In those Black Panther days, brotherhood was all the rage — it’s Black with a ‘B’ in the words on my original vinyl copy. But Billy was a disloyal lowlife who only looked after himself. And so this is the Stagger Lee myth re-created as Blaxploitation tragedy. A card game called America that Billy could never win. The story of a man who escaped his life by becoming someone else, only to forget who he really was.

Did things change as a result of Mayfield’s message? Hell no. The problems are too entrenched. But music has continued to reflect them. Just listen to Mobb Deep from twenty years later to hear the kind of seductive, brutalised nihilism Mayfield warned against. Or spin forward another twenty, to right now. The last few months have brought records by D’Angelo and Kendrick Lamar, each critically acclaimed, each grappling with black pride and identity in a post-Ferguson America. The struggle continues.

It’s big, heady stuff. Too big to contemplate sometimes. Small moments can be easier. Perhaps that’s why forty years on, for all the weight his words carry, it really comes back to that one scene that Mayfield keeps showing us.

The shot across a room that kills Billy Jack.

A small moment with a lot of meaning, captured in twelve short words:

One sided duel, gun and a fool
What a way to go

Curtis Mayfield always knew how to say just enough.