“People Get Ready” by The Impressions

Curtis Mayfield wrote "People Get Ready" on his own, and in 1965 the Impressions issued it as a single and made it the title track of their album that year. No record of theirs is better remembered, and it climbed to number three on Billboard's R&B chart and 14 on the Hot 100.

The church is all over it, a gospel-steeped song that also showed Mayfield's pen turning toward the social and political currents of the day. Martin Luther King Jr. hailed it as the Civil Rights Movement's unofficial anthem, reaching for it to rouse people to march or to steady and console them. The honors piled up later: the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998, the National Recording Registry in 2015, a place among the songs the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame says shaped the music, and number 122 on Rolling Stone's 2021 list of the greatest songs ever.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.