A clean example of a Vox King wah with a
TDK 5103 inductor. Photo courtesy of Guitar
Center Vintage Collection4. Curtis Mayfield and Craig Mullen's VOX King Wah
Even in the late ’60s, when the wah pedal
was primarily a blues-rock staple, it was
almost inevitable that it would become
synonymous with soul music. A well-placed
wah could transform even a mundane,
two-note riff into a plaintive wail, and
that was all it took to draw artists like
Curtis Mayfield to its expressive power.
Surprisingly though, he preferred the simplicity
of an auto-wah, as Craig McMullen,
Mayfield’s go-to guitarist and originator of
the “Superfly” wah guitar sound, explains:
“Curtis never was too much for fooling with
the gadgetry, which is cool because he had
his own unique sound in the way he played,
anyway. So all the wah-wah variations that
you hear on those early records, that was me
on the Vox.”
What often gets lost in the towering
shadow of 1972’s classic Superfly is that
Mayfield and McMullen had already etched
the wah-wah into the soul-funk firmament
the previous year with the sizzling double
LP Curtis/Live!. Incredibly, this was the
5-piece band’s first gig together and it
remains one of the grittiest, funkiest live
performances ever documented. “You figure
we’re at least going to do a couple of gigs to
get tight,” McMullen quips, “but we were
going to go for the jugular vein right now.
And I was, like, ‘Okay, well—you lead, and
we’ll follow!’”
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