The Chicago sound was ushered in by the Impressions` restrained, dignified 1958 single, ”For Your Precious Love,” sung by Jerry Butler.
But it was Curtis Mayfield who molded the Impressions into the prototypical Chicago soul group.
Mayfield`s spare guitar, wispy tenor and exotic way with a rhythm became a hallmark, first on a collaboration with Butler, ”He Will Break Your Heart,” and then on the Impressions` 1961 hit ”Gypsy Woman.”
After Butler and later Richard and Arthur Brooks left the group, Mayfield carried on with Sam Gooden and Fred Cash, and scored a string of hits. Among them were classics such as ”People Get Ready” and ”Keep on Pushing,” which anticipated the civil-rights movement.
He also wrote hits for other Chicago artists such as Major Lance (”The Monkey Time”) and Gene Chandler (”Just Be True”). Meanwhile, Fontella Bass scored with ”Rescue Me,” Billy Stewart with ”Summertime” and the Dells with ”Oh, What a Night.”
Record companies such as Okeh, Chess, Checker, Windy C, Vee-Jay, Brunswick, Mercury and Curtom briefly thrived in Chicago, only to fold within a few years.
The Chi-Lites, whose melancholy 1971 hit ”Have You Seen Her” echoed
”For Your Precious Love” two decades earlier, were the last great group of Chicago`s golden age of soul.
So why didn`t Chicago become synonymous with soul as did Memphis or later Philadelphia?
”There never really was a Chicago sound, like there was a Philly or Memphis or Motown sound,” Butler contends. In those places, the records were defined by a core group of musicians: the MFSB Orchestra in Philadelphia;
Booker T and the MG`s in Memphis; and the Motown house band, led by bassist James Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin, in Detroit.
But in Chicago, ”you had Chess guys, Vee-Jay guys, and a whole bunch of independent groups-and that was just south of Madison Avenue,” Butler says.
”Nobody used anybody else`s musicians. There was another world of musicians on the North Side, guys who never stepped foot on the South Side.”
