Choice of Colors

Choice of Colors

Curtis Mayfield

This week’s music is one of Catherine’s all-time favorite songs. Curtis Mayfield was one of the greatest American performing artists of his generation. Catherine remembers how his music “inspired us to understand and love one another—it called us to the sweetness of soul.”

In “Choice of Colors,” Mayfield was able to build the song’s challenging message into an arc of beautiful, almost symphonic music; this was a great gift of his songwriting, in which he incorporated socially relevant statements and opinions. He clearly conveyed how we can all be our better selves and be stronger than anybody’s “bad self.”

Mayfield was an early proponent of the “Rhythm and Blues” vogue that brought out the popular social commentary “message music” of the 1960s and ‘70s. Being a prolific songwriter, Mayfield also wrote and produced music for many other performing artists and was immensely influential to many contemporary and later artists such as Stevie Wonder and Tracy Chapman.

Curtis Mayfield taught himself to play the guitar and intuitively used a characteristic tuning of F-sharp, which, interestingly, is one of the fundamental resonances of the acoustic properties of the Egyptian pyramids.

In August 1990, stage equipment fell on Mayfield during an outdoor concert in New York, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. Even in these dire straits, he continued to write and record music, lying on his back in the recording studio.

The version of “Choice of Colors” we are hearing is a dynamic cover by Gladys Knight, included on a 1994 compilation album of Mayfield songs in salutation and recognition of his outstanding work—a tribute published while he was still alive. Curtis Mayfield died at the relatively young age of 57, with the paralysis and diabetes having taken more and more of a toll on his health.