He wrote protest songs you could dance to. Curtis Mayfield's falsetto -- that high, fragile, impossibly gentle thing -- was the delivery system for some of the hardest truths the 1970s had to offer. He started with the Impressions, a Chicago vocal group whose harmonies were the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement. People Get Ready. Keep On Pushing. We're a Winner. These weren't just songs. They were instructions.

Then he went solo and made Superfly in 1972, a soundtrack to a blaxploitation film about a cocaine dealer named Priest. The film was stylish and morally ambiguous. The soundtrack was a masterpiece. Freddie's Dead. Pusherman. Superfly. Mayfield wrote about the drug trade from the inside, from the perspective of the people it was destroying -- the dealers, the addicts, the children in the crossfire. The funk was immaculate -- wah-wah guitar, congas, strings arranged by Johnny Pate -- but the lyrics were devastating. Hollywood had never heard anything like it. The album outgrossed the film.

Move On Up is his anthem, and it's the record you play when you need to believe that things are going to get better. Those opening congas. That horn line. That falsetto climbing toward something that feels like hope. Curtis Mayfield made socially conscious music that never felt like a lecture because the groove was always too good to resist. You didn't realize you were being radicalized until it was too late.

In August 1990, at an outdoor concert in Brooklyn, a lighting rig fell on him during a windstorm. It paralyzed him from the neck down. He could no longer play guitar. He could no longer stand. But he could still sing. He recorded his final album, New World Order, lying on his back in the studio, delivering each line one breath at a time, pausing between phrases because the paralyzed diaphragm couldn't sustain a note. It took him years. The album was released in 1996. His voice had never sounded stronger. Curtis Mayfield died in 1999 at 57 from complications of diabetes. The man who couldn't stand recorded his masterpiece on his back. The music never stopped.