At a time when once again, our civil and human rights are under concerted attack, we can always turn to our elder statespersons and artists to lift us up and give us inspiration as we organize and fight back. As we do so, we should also remember to celebrate them with our thanks and gratitude for the gifts they’ve given us over the years.
With that in mind, our sister Mavis Staples turns 84 on Monday, so let us come together to celebrate her life, her music, her courage, and her faith in humanity.
Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music. With over 160 stories (and counting) covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack, I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
Staples’ career in music started with The Staple Singers in 1948, and she is still going strong! Music editor James M. Manheim wrote about Staples' beginnings in a biography for Musician Guide.
Mavis Staples was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 10, 1939 (or, according to some sources, 1940). Her father, Roebuck "Pops" Staples, had grown up on Mississippi's Dockery Plantation, a key site in the development of the blues, and had learned to play the guitar from the great early bluesman Charley Patton. After he moved north to Chicago in 1936, Pops Staples began to organize gospel quartets that would meet after he finished his day's work at a meatpacking plant. And it was gospel that Mavis Staples heard at home. "He used to play records by the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Soul Sisters, the Blind Boys of Mississippi as well as the Blind Boys of Alabama, but after I heard [gospel great] Mahalia [Jackson] sing 'Move On Up a Little Higher,' I had to play her music every day," Staples told Greg Quill of the Toronto Star.
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Staples considered going to nursing school, but finally chose to stay with the family group; she often told a story of how her father, one of 14 children, would hold 14 pencils together to show his own children how hard they were to break, as compared with breaking each one individually. In the 1960s, some said, the Staple Singers provided the soundtrack to the civil rights revolution. African-American groups found common cause with white folk performers, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., preached the gospel of equal rights across the South.
"I really like this man's message and I think if he can preach it, we can sing it," Pops Staples told his children, as Mavis recalled to Harrington. The Staple Singers performed with the then-acoustic folk musician Bob Dylan and began to record his songs, including the blistering antiwar anthem "Masters of War." Dylan, for his part, had been a Staple Singers fan ever since he heard their recordings on Nashville AM radio powerhouse WLAC as a 12-year-old in Minnesota. A romance sprang up between Dylan and Mavis Staples, although it was not publicly revealed until many years later. Dylan proposed marriage at one point, but was turned down, even though Pops Staples backed the union. The two remained friends, and Staples later regretted her decision. "It was really too bad," she told Harrington. "I often wonder when I see Bobby's son Jakob, how would our son have looked and how would he have sounded."
Those of us who were part of the Civil Rights Movement will not forget the Staple Singers’ contributions to the soundtrack of our struggle. In 2015, Stephen M. Deusner wrote for Pitchfork about the rerelease of the Staple Singers 1965 album “Freedom Highway.”
It’s impossible to discuss the Staple Singers’ 1965 live album Freedom Highway without considering what was going down in America that year. On March 7, more than 600 marchers set out to make the 50-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and were attacked by Alabama state troopers and armed posses. Two days later, they tried again, but turned back when Governor George Wallace denied them state protection. Two long weeks later, they tried a third time, with federal protection from the US Army and the National Guard. It took them three days, but they finally reached the state capitol.
Just a few weeks later and several hundred miles north, one of the hottest groups on the gospel circuit debuted a new song during a service at the New Nazareth Church on Chicago’s South Side. Pops Staples, patriarch and bandleader of the formidable Staple Singers, explained the inspiration in his introduction. "From that march, word was revealed and a song was composed," he explains, sounding less like a preacher addressing his congregation and more like a close friend shaking your hand. "And we wrote a song about the freedom marchers and we call it the ‘Freedom Highway’, and we dedicate this number to all the freedom marchers." As he is addressing the congregation, Pops strikes a clutch of chords on his guitar, and those chords coalesce into a spry blues riff that he sends rolling down the aisles of New Nazareth.
With that, let’s get on that Freedom Highway!
Life on the road in the South back in those days could be perilous. In this 2017 interview with “Sound Opinions” hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, Staples recalls a night in Mississippi when a young white gas station attendant called her the N-word.
I have never forgotten watching the Staple Singers performing before a massive Black audience in the 1972 film “Wattstax.” The following clip features performances of “Oh La De Da,” followed by “We The People” and “Respect Yourself.”
RELATED STORY: Black Music Sunday: Remembering when there were 'Stax' of soul musicians in Memphis
It’s impossible for me to post one favorite tune from the Staple Singers’ extensive discography; I just have so many. But I can still remember dancing my ass off to their hit tune “I’ll Take You There,” so let’s go with that one.
Diane Moroff continues Staples’ journey as a solo artist in a second Musician Guide biography—including her relationship with Prince.
Prince acted as a knight in shining armor to Staples, whose career had been static for a decade.
Troubled with taxes and unpaid bills, she had been reduced to selling her car for cash. Then Prince, who later changed his named to an unpronounceable symbol, offered her a seven-year contract on Paisley Park Records …
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When the family's career seemed to hit a dead end, Pops told her, "Mavis, you better go on and try to find a label. The Lord gifted you with your voice and if you don't use it he'll take it back."
Prince's interest in Staples's career seemed like a godsend. But because of her deep religious convictions and political commitment, Staples's union with the controversial singer-songwriter miffed and confused a number of her listeners. Alf Billingham of Melody Maker reported Staples's amused response: "I was told that I shouldn't be doing stuff with Prince because of his reputation for writing suggestive lyrics. Who do they think I am? The Singing Nun?" Staples does not fear Prince's exhibitionist sexuality. She considers it a healthy sign of his youth and notes that he does not impose it on the music he writes for her. Prince has produced two albums for Staples: Time Waits for No One in 1989 and The Voice in 1993.
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On the 1993 album The Voice, Staples's personality is wholly present, thanks in part to Prince's songs--he wrote or cowrote seven of the album's 12 songs--which Staples feels "are about my life," she told Billboard' s David Nathan. She found "Blood Is Thicker Than Time" particularly moving. "[It] is very special for me. I got so choked up when we were recording it that I had to stop. The song takes me back to my childhood, to those Sunday mornings when I couldn't wait to get to church.... The song's about family coming together, and love."
Give “Blood is Thicker Than Time” a listen:
While looking for videos of Staples for this story, I was delighted to find that in 2020, NPR rereleased Staples’ 2010 appearance from its “Tiny Desk Concerts” archives. She is accompanied by guitarist Rick Holmstrom.
From NPR Music’s YouTube notes:
Mavis Staples is a legend, but she's not stuck in the past. You probably know her work with her family band, The Staple[s] Singers, which was all over the radio in the '70s with hits like "Respect Yourself," "Let's Do It Again" and "I'll Take You There" (which she excerpts in her performance here).What you may not know is that Mavis Staples has been actively working with her fellow Chicago musician (and Wilco leader) Jeff Tweedy on her upcoming album, You Are Not Alone. Tweedy produced the record and wrote a few songs for her, as well — including the title track, which she sings here.
In 2017, Elon Green wrote for The New Yorker about Staples’ response to the advent of Donald Trump and pressing social issues.
Mavis Staples on Prince, Trump, Black Lives Matter, and Her Exercise Regimen | The New Yorker
Mavis Staples on Prince, Trump, Black Lives Matter, and Her Exercise Regimen | The New Yorker
The last eight months—roughly the amount of time since Donald J. Trump’s Inauguration—haven’t smothered Mavis Staples’s irrepressible optimism, but it’s been palpably tempered. She faced dark days even before the election in 2016, when Prince died that April. Staples’s feelings for Prince, her friend and onetime producer, bordered on maternal: he had two mothers, she once said, and she would e-mail him with the greeting “Hello, son!” “Oh, Lord, I miss Prince so much. I can hardly listen to him yet without breaking down,” she told me recently, briefly home from the road. Staples has photos of Prince in her house in Chicago, including a wall calendar from 1987 given to her by the man himself. “It’s from back in the day. But I keep it hanging and every month I change it.”
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Staples’s forthcoming album, “If All I Was Was Black,” recalls the family’s civil-rights-era records. Like “Freedom Highway,” written by Pops following the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, the new songs are nakedly current. The album, recorded over a week in May with the aid of her frequent producer, Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, is largely steeped in frustration. Staples’s voice has a strength and endurance not heard in years, owing in part to an exercise regimen begun in preparation for last December’s Kennedy Center Honors. “I decided if I want to continue to sing, which I love, I need to keep moving,” she said. Her road manager secured a trainer in Hyde Park, and now, three times a week, she walks on the treadmill and, adorned with pink boxing gloves, sweatily punches a heavy bag twenty or thirty times at a stretch.
The payoff is heard when Staples sings the first lines of the new album’s opening track, “Little Bit,” about an unnamed boy stopped by police. It effectively lays down a dark marker for the rest of the record:
This life surrounds you
The guns are loaded
This a kind of tension
Hard not to notice . . .
Poor kid they caught him
Without his license
That ain’t why they shot him
They say he was fighting
So
That’s what we were told
But we all know
That ain’t how the story goes.
Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland loom over the record, even as they are unnamed. This is also true of Trump, though Staples doesn’t mind saying so. “He has brought so much hurt on us,” she said. “It seems that this man has brought a rebirth; the bigotry and hate has resurfaced through him.”
Here’s “Little Bit.”
A potential surprise for some Mavis Staples fans is her work with young Irish musician and singer-songwriter Andrew John Hozier-Byrne, known as simply “Hozier.” Alan Sculley wrote for The Spokesman-Review about them coming together in his review of Hozier’s second album, “Wasteland Baby,” which was released in 2018.
Even if Hozier’s newly released second album, “Wasteland! Baby,” fails to come close to having the success of his debut effort, the Irish singer/songwriter will always have at least one memory that will make the new album stand out over time.
That experience came in recording the lead track and first single “Nina Cried Power,” when Hozier got to work in the studio with gospel/soul great Mavis Staples and legendary keyboardist Booker T. Jones. The song pays homage to artists – Staples being a prime example – who stood up for civil rights, both in their music and their work for the cause.
“It was an absolute honor having Mavis, the fact that she was up for being part of that song and she knew where it was coming from,” Hozier said in a recent phone interview. “She’s a super important artist and just a total hero. That song was written about artists like her. She totally embodies what that song is about. And then Booker T, the first band I was ever in at 14 or 15, I joined a group of kind of older kids. We were covering Stax (Records songs played by) Booker T & the MGs. Being able to tell him that (was special), that his music is one of the reasons I became a musician and have continued with it.”
“Nina Cried Power” refers, of course, to Nina Simone, and the song is a stirring coming together—and a clear example of how Mavis Staples continues to inspire.
Lyrics
It's not the wakin', it's the risin'
It is the groundin' of a foot uncompromisin'
It's not forgoin' of the lie
It's not the openin' of eyes
It's not the wakin', it's the risin'
It's not the shade we should be cast in
It's the light and it's the obstacle that casts it
It's the heat that drives the light
It's the fire it ignites
It's not the wakin', it's the risin'
It's not the song, it is the singin'
It's the heaven of the human spirit ringin'
It is the bringin' of the line
It is the bearin' of the lie
It's not the wakin', it's the risin'
And I could cry power (power)
Power (power)
Power, Lord
Nina cried power
Billie cried power
Mavis cried power
And I could cry power (power)
Power (power)
Power, Lord
Curtis cried power
Patti cried power
Nina cried power
It's not the war but what's behind it
Lord, the fear of foul men is mere assignment
And everythin' that we're denied by keepin' the divide
It's not the wakin', it's the risin'
And I could cry power (power)
Power (power)
Power, Lord
Nina cried power
Lennon cried power
James Brown cried power
And I could cry power
Power (power)
Power (power)
Power, Lord
B.B. cried power
Joni cried power
Nina cried power
And I could cry power
Power has been cried by those stronger than me
Straight into the face that tells you to rattle your chains
If you love bein' free
Ah, Lord, I could cry power (power)
'Cause power is my love and my righteous to me
James Brown cried power
Seeger cried power
Woman cried power
Yeah ah, power
James cried power
Millie cried power
Kenny cried power
Billie, power
Dylan, power
Woody, power
Nina cried power
I encourage you to take the time to read this 2022 story from The New Yorker, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Remnick.
Simply sharing a few paragraphs from Remnick’s story cannot do it justice. At the very end of the piece, which covers her entire history (and she was 82 when the interview took place!), we are reminded that she is now alone, having lost all the members of her family, and many of the musicians she was close to.
As Remnick writes:
When we talked later, Staples returned, as always, to the weight that bears down on her: the loneliness she feels when she is not singing, all the missing—Oceola, Cynthia, Pervis, Cleotha, Pops, Yvonne. I asked her if she thinks about the end.
“You know, I do,” she said. “I do quite often. And I wonder how I’m going to go. Where will I be? I’ve prepared everything. I have a will—because I have a lot of nieces and nephews, Pervis’s children, and charities. But I seem to think about that more now than ever. And I tell myself, ‘I gotta stop thinking.’ [road manager] Speedy, he tells me maybe I should talk to a therapist. I said, ‘Don’t need no therapist. The Lord is my therapist. That’s who I talk to when I need help.’ ”
I asked her if she gets an answer.
“Yes, indeed. That’s why I’m still here. He lets me know when I’m right and when I’m wrong, but he ain’t letting me know about when my time is coming. But, see, I just have to be ready. If it comes tomorrow, I’m ready. I have done all that I’m supposed to do. I’ve been good. I’ve kept my father’s legacy alive. Pops started this, and I’m not just going to squander it. I’m going to sing every time I get on the stage—I’m gonna sing with all my heart and all I can put out.”
And she is doing just that. In a review of Staples’ Independence Day concert this week, Ed Potton writes, “we can only worship at her chapel.”
“This ain’t the last you’ll see of me,” Mavis Staples said with a grin. Hoorah for that, because at 83 the soul-gospel legend has still got it: charisma, ebullience and a sensational baritone.
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Like a vintage Chevy, she took a while to warm up. On the opening cover of Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth some of the heavy lifting was done by her two female backing singers and even the audience, as Staples held out her microphone. But by the second song, Soldier, the engine was purring. “You gotta let loose, like a bowl of jello!” she commanded the audience. They obliged, roaring and clapping in time. Staples referred to the Union Chapel, a 19th-century gothic revival church, as “home”, and you can see why she keeps coming back here: the acoustics suit her band’s warm blend of soul, gospel and rock’n’roll, and she remains a devout Christian. The crowd, though, were worshiping at the chapel of Mavis.
Since there is no video available from Tuesday’s Union Chapel gig as of this writing (except for shaky cell phone videos), let’s enjoy Staples’ opener at the venue, from her 75th birthday concert.
You know I’ve got lots more Mavis to play for her 84rd birthday, so join me in the comments for the party—and be sure to post your favorites!