A better day is coming

Curtis Mayfield never raised his voice, and that gentleness is the whole trick of “People Get Ready”. Written in the wake of the March on Washington and recorded with The Impressions in 1965, it borrows its imagery straight from the church of his Chicago childhood — the train, the boarding call, no ticket needed — and turns it into an invitation rather than a sermon.

“That was taken from my church,” Mayfield said of it, “or from the upbringing of messages from the church.” The song carried further than most pulpits: it reached number three on the R&B chart, Martin Luther King Jr. adopted it as an unofficial anthem of the movement, and the Library of Congress later added it to the National Recording Registry.

But set all that aside and just listen to the arrangement — the muted horns, the three voices trading lines like a congregation passing a hymnal down the pew, Mayfield’s guitar chiming underneath. “People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’.” You board it in the first ten seconds.