Curtis Mayfield

The comeback record he made after regrouping the band with money earned trailing Butler's tour. It was the first proof that Mayfield, not yet twenty, could stand on his own as songwriter and lead singer.

• In the introduction, percussion clicking like castanets and a Latin-tinged rhythm open the scene as if conjuring a dancing gypsy before our eyes.
• Mayfield's lead is a relaxed tenor that floats lightly in the high register. This way of telling a story rather than shouting it would become his lifelong signature.
• The members' low supporting harmonies interlace with the lead vocal, and the harmonic sense honed in their gospel days melts naturally into a pop frame.
• Striking is the craftsmanship that fits a whole story, from first meeting to wistful parting, into a song of under three minutes.

Released in a year when the civil rights movement was gathering force, it became a song for the people who marched. It was the first time his way of singing endurance in the language of gospel met its moment.

• The Impressions' signature design, with the three handing off the lead line by line, stands out clearly. Sam Gooden's low voice and Mayfield's high one form a contrast.
• The horn section arranged by Johnny Pate punches in short, forceful accents, creating a drive like footsteps pressing forward.
• The lyrics carry a vow to keep pushing on despite obstacles, yet sung as a calm, repeated resolve rather than a shouted slogan, they sound all the firmer.
• You can hear a melodic frame that seems borrowed from church hymns, a moment where the line between secular hit and song of faith blurs.

Borrowing the train metaphor he learned in his grandmother's church, he sang of a road to salvation open to all. It endures as an anthem of the civil rights movement and his signature work.

• The guitar in the introduction has the clear, soft ring of the F-sharp tuning he devised himself. Rather than strumming, he spreads the chords with light embellishments, and that playing sets the breath of the whole song.
• Over a slow tempo the three share out the lines, and a restraint in which no one pushes forward creates an atmosphere like prayer.
• The arrangement lays down strings and bell-like tones softly underneath, carrying gospel's reverence into the texture of pop.
• The image of an invitation to board the train singles no one out and calls to everyone, so it sounds like embrace rather than anger. That is why countless singers would later take up the song.

The centerpiece of his first solo album after leaving the group. His wish to shed the single format bursts out in a performance of nearly nine minutes.

• The opening horn fanfare throws the song's doors wide, and behind it congas and bongos drive relentlessly, pushing a fast groove.
• Mayfield sings high, light yet urgent, urging the listener not to give up but to keep rising. It is a song of hope set against the dark street portraits of the tracks before it.
• On the album version, percussion, horns and guitar carry on a long improvisation after the singing ends, and here you can hear soul widening toward funk and jazz.
• It became a hit single in Britain before America, and it keeps being called up by new generations — in 2005 Kanye West's “Touch the Sky” lifted its horn introduction (sampling).

A song about the death of Freddie, a supporting character in the film Super Fly. While the film made the drug dealer glamorous, he sang of the misery of one who falls in the street.

• A bass riff repeating doggedly in the low register forms the song's backbone and holds the tension from start to finish.
• A guitar played through a pedal that makes the sound cry 'wah-wah' (wah-wah pedal) circles above the bass, creating the texture of 1970s urban cinema.
• Johnny Pate's arrangements for strings and horns cut in with urgency, so that a song of barely three minutes plays like a scene from a film.
• Mayfield sings without inflating the sorrow, evenly, almost as if filing a news report. That very calm is what gives his warning about the ravages of drugs its weight.

The title track of his final album, completed after his paralysis by recording a line or two at a time while lying down. His body was bound, but the way he spoke of hope was no different from the 1960s.

• His voice is lower than in his prime and heavily mixed with breath. Knowing that he could not sing long stretches at once and had to record in short fragments, you hear the seams between phrases differently.
• Over the sleek drum programming and keyboards of 1990s R&B rest gentle harmonies that recall his old songs.
• Lyrics that sing of a new world order speak, like the marching songs of his youth, of a community's dignity and reconciliation. Across a gap of thirty years, the same message carries on.
• In the passages where other musicians play in his style in place of the man who could no longer play guitar, you can feel that the sound he left behind had already become a language of its own.