The Impressions: People Get Ready

I was thinking the other day of First Impressions, a song made the charts in the UK in 1975. It's a song about the importance of those first impressions ("First impressions are lasting impressions..."), and sounds like the sort of thing your Mum and Jordan Peterson would have come up with if they sat down to write a hit together.

It turned out to be by the Chicago vocal group The Impressions, who used to have a more radical take on things. Because they were the group that Curtis Mayfield started out with and who recorded his famous song People Get Ready in 1965.

Brad Erickson explains its significance:

Out of context, “People Get Ready,” like “Go Down Moses” before it, is a simple song of Christian faith. The train is God’s grace in the former and the refrain, “Let my people go” has no special resonance for African Americans in the latter. 

But Martin Luther King, Jr. named “People Get Ready” the unofficial anthem of the Civil Rights Movement and often used the song to get people marching or to calm and comfort them. The racial subtext was obvious to African Americans and this encouraged Mayfield to write songs with explicit social messages.