Luckiest Music Generation: Curtis Mayfield - Get Down
One of the weird things about growing up as a dumb white kid in the South is that we actually have good access to black culture, if we're willing to make the effort to appreciate what's right there.
I don't know about now, but, back in the day, most middling Southern towns had a "black" station that played all the cool stuff that was popular in the black community, but somehow stuck in the lower reaches of the usual Billboard Top 100. So kinda popular with white people...but not.
Yet we dumb hicks could get what was burning up the R&B charts, without even having to live in an urban area.
Curtis Mayfield in the early 70s, when I was really getting into music, was one of THE big stars on the old black AM station in my town. Most white people only knew him for "Freddy's Dead," but then there was the rest of his catalog that sorta got ignored outside of the black community. Incredible stuff like this amazing, funky tune that could have been huge on Top 40, if given better air play:
Bonus: The line dance to "Get Down" on a memorable episode of Soul Train:
You can tell this is 1971 by the hot pants and shortness of the women's dresses. And holy cow, but Don Cornelius's jacket is EVERYTHING that was so-bad-it's-good 70s fashion.
