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Northern Soul Season: Curtis Mayfield and The Fascinations

Bob Stanley on Curtis Mayfield's huge successes in 1960s Chicago...

Fascinations

Girls Are Out To Get You

Given that he was leading the , one of the most successful soul groups in America, as singer and sole songwriter, it seems incredible that Curtis Mayfield had any time in the sixties to do much else. Yet he was one-man Chicago hit machine: The Monkey Time (1963) and Um Um Um Um Um (1964) were both sizeable hits for his pal Major Lance (the latter was also a UK Top 5 hit for Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders); the sweet voiced Jan Bradley had a US Top 20 hit with the Mayfield-penned-and-produced Mama Didn't Lie in '63; and Jerry Butler, the Impressions' original singer, had a run of singles on Vee Jay that were mostly assembled by Curtis, including the beautiful Need To Belong and US no.7 hit He Will Break Your Heart in 1960 (covered in Britain by the Merseybeats).

The Impressions

Still, Curtis obviously had plenty of time on his hands. The Impressions' run of thirty one Hot Hundred entries in the sixties wasn't keeping him busy enough, so in 1966 he started the Mayfield label. Detroit girl group the Fascinations were one of his first signings. Their roots were in a gospel group called the Boswell Sisters (no, not the jazz vocal act of the thirties) and had been a member in the early sixties when they were known as the Sabre-ettes. He had first worked with them in late '62 for ABC-Paramount on another version of Mama Didn't Lie, which lost out in a chart race with Jan Bradley. After an uptempo Mayfield-written follow up called You're Gonna Be Sorry flopped, ABC dropped them. Club work continued but there were no more Fascinations records for several years - Fern Bledsoe paid her rent in the meantime by working as a secretary at Motown, where she became a fount of news and gossip for Dave Godin's Tamla Motown Appreciation Society in the UK.

Curtis Mayfield had set up the Windy C label in early 1966, immediately scoring hits with the Five Stairsteps, and launched its sister Mayfield label late that summer with the Fascinations' comeback single (Say It Isn't So) Say You'd Never Go, reaching no.47 on the Billboard R&B chart. The Motown-influenced Girls Are Out To Get You gave them their only taste of crossover success (a US no.92 in early '67; a UK no.32 four years later), and continues to be a much loved floorfiller. The blues-flecked Hold On in early '68 proved to be the last single for both the Fascinations and the Mayfield label, as Curtis Mayfield concentrated on his new - and hugely successful - Curtom venture. Shirley Walker, Joanne Levell, Bernadine Boswell and Fern Bledsoe retired the Fascinations and went back to Detroit, leaving for posterity seven collectable singles that are a near-perfect blend of girl group emotion and sophisticated Chicago soul.