By Joe McEwen
Keep on pushing, move on up, we’re a winner: these exhortations were at the forefront of the content and spirit of the music Curtis Mayfield recorded with his group, The Impressions, in the mid and late 1960s. If his record, “People Get Ready,” captured a more steady, righteous, nose-to-the-moral-grindstone tone, “We’re a Winner,” released in l967, lifted higher and aimed for a more liberating result.
The music matched the message and performance. Arranged and produced by Mayfield’s long-time, hugely undervalued creative partner, Johnny Pate, “We’re a Winner” explodes from the opening brass flourish. A live studio audience, recorded at Chicago’s Universal Studio, adds a kinetic energy throughout– right from the “Come on sock it to me!” shout-out that follows the two-note horn blast intro. This record demanded attention.
Still it’s the words that carry the day:
"I don’t mind leaving here,
To show the world we have no fear
‘cause we’re a winner
and everybody knows it’s true
we’ll just keep on pushing..“
"We’re a Winner,” rose to Number One on the black radio charts that year. The mood and emotional force it thrusts out, born of the Civil Rights Movement a few years before, was also directly carried forward in the increasingly aggressive speeches of Martin Luther King. 1967 was a tipping point in so much of American society – race riots, Vietnam the war, and the accompanying protests – the basic challenge of ‘what it was and what it is,’ to ‘what could be and what should be.’ The ceiling-breaking liberation that imbued “the message” got so ratcheted up that it had nowhere to go except burst. And it did, quickly. Still, these many years later the words bang around in my head. How that poetry must have been such an inspiration to the man that authored them.
Sam Cooke’s transcendent “A Change is Gonna Come” was born of the same era, and the same racial striving, as the Impressions records. Barack Obama has used both "A Change is Gonna Come" and “Keep On Pushing”, to powerful effect in major speeches. Currently, a Samsung commercial featuring basketball star LeBron James, in winningly relaxed engagement with family and friends, has “Keep On Pushing” as its music bed. The message of warmth, hope and resolve remains vital and stirring. “We’re a winner, and everybody knows it’s true” is more than a self-help mantra, it’s a primal declaration of basic civil and human rights. Keep on pushing indeed.
Bonus Extra Credit in the College of Musical Knowledge:
Mr. C’s Johnny Pate primer