People Get Ready

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Album at Rhino.com

Written by: Curtis Mayfield
Produced by: Johnny Pate
Released: Jan. '65 on ABC-Paramount
Charts: 8 weeks
Top spot: No. 14

"It was warrior music," said civil-rights activist Gordon Sellers. "It was music you listened to while you were preparing to go into battle." Mayfield wrote the gospel-driven R&B ballad, he said, "in a deep mood, a spiritual state of mind," just before Martin Luther King's march on the group's hometown of Chicago. Shortly after "People Get Ready" was released, Chicago churches began including their own version of it in songbooks. Mayfield had ended the song with "You don't need no ticket/You just thank the Lord," but the church version, ironically, made it less Christian and more universal: "Everybody wants freedom/This I know."

Appears on: The Very Best of the Impressions (Rhino)

Next: God Only Knows

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