Curtis Mayfield Childhood Home — Chicago

Curtis Mayfield grew up in the Cabrini-Green public housing projects on Chicago's Near North Side, and the community forged both his musical sensibility and his social consciousness. He began singing in the church at a young age and formed the Impressions with Jerry Butler as a teenager in the late 1950s. The Gospel Travelers choir at Mayfield's grandmother's church in Cabrini-Green was where he first learned to sing and play guitar, using an open tuning that gave his music its distinctive shimmer. The tension between spiritual aspiration and urban deprivation that he witnessed growing up in the projects runs through everything he wrote.

Mayfield became one of the most important voices of the civil rights era, writing 'People Get Ready' (1965) — called 'the soul of the civil rights movement' — as well as 'Keep On Pushing,' 'We're a Winner,' and 'Move On Up.' His soundtrack for the 1972 film Super Fly, recorded at the height of the blaxploitation era, was a commercial and artistic landmark that used the genre's conventions to deliver a critique of the drug economy. He was paralysed from the neck down in 1990 when a lighting rig collapsed on him at an outdoor concert in Brooklyn.

The Cabrini-Green projects themselves were demolished between 1995 and 2011 as part of Chicago's public housing transformation plan. The area has been redeveloped into mixed-income housing. No dedicated Mayfield landmark remains at the site, though the broader Near North Side neighbourhood is developing. Chicago's rich soul music heritage is commemorated in various locations around the city.