Breath support

Curtis Mayfield was an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, record producer and one of the most influential musicians behind socially conscious soul music. He was such a soul man that his son eventually wrote a biography about his father called "Traveling Soul." And what a road he traveled. As part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group "The Impressions," Mayfield wrote the song "People Get Ready," which ranks twenty-fourth on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. You have probably heard it: "People get ready/There's a train a comin'/You don't need no baggage/You just get on board…" 

On Aug. 13, 1990, Mayfield was asked to headline an R&B concert at Wingate Field in Brooklyn, New York. He was waiting in the wings, as the other acts — the Delfonics, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes—performed. A storm began to brew. With 10,000 excited fans in attendance, the event promoter felt that the show had to go on despite the swirling winds. Mayfield’s band rushed out and did a sound check. They started playing the notes to the song "Superfly," which was Curtis’s cue to come on stage. As he walked on, poised to take the microphone from the event promoter, a huge gust of wind blew, and a lighting tower came crashing onto the stage, missing the percussionist but destroying his drum kit as it fell towards Mayfield. It struck him on the neck, shattering the third, fourth, and fifth vertebrae. He lay still on the stage, drifting in and out of consciousness as the rain beat down hard, thunder crashing and objects flying off stage into the panicked audience. Several people were hurt, and at age forty-eight, Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed from the neck down for the remainder of his life. 

Mayfield could no longer play the guitar or move his lower body, but the soul music pioneer refused to give up. His first and last studio release after the incident in Brooklyn was his 1996 album "New World Order," whose title song became the theme song for Spike Lee’s movie "Get on the Bus." And do you know how this paralyzed man recorded this final album? He laid on his back allowing gravity to pull into his lungs the oxygen necessary to sing — one line at a time.

“You just have to deal with what you got, try to sustain yourself as best as you can and look to the things that you can do,” Mayfield said in an interview after his accident. That’s how he responded to his life change. Through pain, on his back, he sang lyrics like "Summer, winter or just cold … through the rain and through the snow… Let’s get on back to living again … Now it's always the right time/With somethin' positive in your mind/There's always someone to pull you down/you just get back up and hold your ground. Let’s get back to living again."

Mayfield could still sustain enough breath support to go on living, but this isn’t always true for others. Breath can be knocked out of you for good. You may not realize its value until it’s gone, especially when it is the last breath of a loved one in hospice or in a plane crash. When breath is gone, life is gone, and the music stops. Sometimes breath expires due to natural causes, while other times, the violence of kneeing or choking causes a person to say, "I can’t breathe."

There are times when we can lack breath support and don’t freely breathe as we should, whether physically or metaphorically. This became clear for one preacher at the wrong time. She was fired up in the speaking moment. Her volume was high, and her rhythm was beating like a drum. Her pitch was at full throttle as she rose to the heights of a vocal musical celebration, taking the excited congregation along with her for the spiritual ride. The congregation was celebrating with her via call and response when all of a sudden her pace and intensity got the best of her. She was on a high, but her breath support was low, so low that right at the point when she was about sing or intone at the climax, she fainted!

Beyond the literal lack of breath support, there is the figurative loss of breath. One afternoon a woman named Rose and I were sitting in a restaurant sharing a meal together. Rose began telling me about her relationship with her husband over the years and how he had abused her and her daughter, and yet she remained married to him. At one point in the conversation, after hearing the horrific stories and seeing the tears of pain drop from her face, I said to her, "That’s not living." Rose responded, "Luke, I died a long time ago." She was a member of the walking dead, an empty shell because, metaphorically, she had no life within her, no breath. 

When breath is gone from others, it affects all of us. I say this following Dr. Ashon Crawley, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, who writes in his book "Blackpentecostal Breath" that breathing is "exorbitantly social." An instructor of cinematic arts here at Duke, Archer Boyette, created a multimedia installation titled "we breathe each other in and out of existence." In an interview about her work, Boyette said: "On the surface, 'we breathe each other in and out of existence' seems like a grandiose or lofty statement, but it’s really just fundamentally true. It’s a fact, our interdependence with plants and our connectedness. We literally facilitate each other’s breath."