‘I have to be the history’: The work still isn’t done for Mavis Staples

When I once suggested to Mavis Staples that new generations of her listeners might be unaware of her history as a civil-rights activist, she nodded. “People forget the history or some don’t know it at all,” she said. “That’s why I have to be the history.”

That sense of purpose radiates from the singer whenever she takes the stage. In recent months, she’s been performing “I’m Just Another Soldier,” one of the deep cuts on one of the Staple Singers’ signature albums, Bealtitude, the one with massive hits “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There.” Mavis always loved the composition by her Memphis pals Homer Banks and Raymond Jackson, and so did her father, Pops. It spoke to her family’s mission during the civil-rights era, and it feels just as relevant today.

At her 85th birthday celebration in Chicago, she and her band brought some righteous fervor to the song. “I’m here on the battlefield every day,” Mavis shouted as the arrangement hit the finish line. “Fighting for you, fighting for me, fighting for peace.”

Mavis Staples debuted as a singer in the late 1940s when she was all of 8 years old. She was the youngest member of her family group, the Staple Singers, as they performed in Black churches across deeply segregated Chicago. By the time she was a teenager, she was the group’s lead singer. Even in a crowded gospel community brimming with legendary voices such as family friends Mahalia Jackson, Albertina Walker and Sam Cooke, the Staple Singers stood out because of their sound: haunting four-part gospel harmonies underpinned by blues guitar. Blues and gospel rarely mixed in the first half of the 20th Century, but the family’s patriarch, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, saw them as complementary. His tremolo-soaked guitar playing drew on the tradition forged by Charley Patton at Dockery Farm in Mississippi, where Pops grew up in a sharecropping family. With harmonies provided by his children, Cleotha and Pervis (and later Yvonne), and Mavis’ soul-deep contralto out front, the Staple Singers wowed congregations across Chicago. By 1957, the Staples were a national act, thanks to Mavis’ haunted, mature-beyond-her-years lead vocal on the gospel standard “Uncloudy Day.”

In the ’60s, the Staples became vocal supporters of Martin Luther King’s civil-rights crusade, and began incorporating secular message songs into their repertoire. They were the first group outside of the folk scene to cover the compositions of a young Bob Dylan, who was smitten with both the Staples’ sound and with Mavis herself, though she turned down his marriage proposals.

As violence against the Black community escalated, the Staple Singers became even more outspoken. Pops wrote “Freedom Highway” about the bloodshed he witnessed during King’s protest marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965. That year, a live performance of the then-freshly written song anchored the group’s landmark performance in front of a boisterous congregation at Chicago’s New Nazareth Church. (Consumer tip: If you want to know what the Staple Singers sounded like in front of an amped-up hometown audience, check out one of the greatest live albums ever made: Freedom Highway Complete – Recorded Live at Chicago’s New Nazareth Church.)

At Stax Records in the ’70s, the Staples became soul-music legends with a string of hits. Mavis’ ability to improvise became a hallmark of the sound. On “I’ll Take You There,” she conjures an entire universe out of five lines of verse in tandem with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section. When I once asked her how she managed to pull so much life out of so few words, she reminded me that she’d been doing exactly that since she was a kid. “Call and response, shouting the congregation – we grew up on those ‘holy ghost’ moments where the spirit just takes over and you fly,” she said.

The group became something of an oldies act in the post-disco decades, though Mavis remained in demand. At the height of his fame, Prince reached out to the singer and wrote and produced two albums for her. When I visited Prince years later at his studio outside Minneapolis, he showed me a handful of letters Mavis had written to him on yellow legal paper that detailed her life experiences. “She said if I was going to write songs for her, I needed to know her,” Prince said. “What she didn’t realize was that she was helping me understand myself better. Her words got me through a really difficult period in my life.”

When Pops died in 2000, it was Mavis who needed consolation. She would occasionally drive over to her father’s empty house in a Chicago suburb, sit on his bed and ask him for guidance. It was her sister, Yvonne, who delivered the wake-up call: Pops’ work isn’t done. Get going. Be the history.

“She kicked my you-know-what,” Mavis said with a laugh. At age 64, she started over and began building one of the greatest late-career acts in music history. Her solo albums reclaimed the Staple Singers’ legacy as freedom-song pioneers and repurposed them for the new challenges of the 21st Century. Her Ry Cooder-produced 2007 album, We’ll Never Turn Back (another must-own), found the singer reconfiguring the songs her family sang during the MLK era with a bevy of personal touches, ad-libs and asides. Soon after she began working with a road band that suited her strengths as a go-with-the-flow improviser: guitarist Rick Holmstrom, drummer Stephen Hodges and bassist Jeff Turmes, plus a handful of trusted back-up singers. She kept refreshing the set list with new songs from her recent solo albums, written by contemporary acolytes such as Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Valerie June, M. Ward and Ben Harper.

Though Staples isn’t a songwriter, she has a way of making every song her own. “If I can’t connect with the lyrics, I can’t sing it,” she said. “It’s something Pops always emphasized. The singer has to become the song.”

When approached to write a song for Staples’ 2016 album, “Livin’ on a High Note,” Neko Case was daunted by the prospect of coming up with something that a singer she had long admired would embrace. “I started with the key of E, which she usually starts in,” Case said. “I watched interviews where she talked about why the Staple Singers sang certain songs. There were horrible things that happened during the civil rights movement, and they sang about that, but they also managed to be uplifting. The thing I kept coming back to is how people tend to forget the past, how awful war is or marching through fire hoses and tear gas to stand up for the right to vote. We keep losing those strands, and I thought about those strands from a woman’s perspective, an LGBTQ  perspective, a human perspective, an Americana perspective.”

Case’s song, “History, Now,” was the result: “What do we do with this history now/ Do we go in like a surgeon/ Do we go in with boots on the ground?”

Staples connected with it immediately. “Neko gets it. That song is really what the Staple Singers have always been about.”

I caught up with Case later and asked her what she thought of Mavis’ finished recording. “I was totally bawling,” she said. “I wrote a dark song, and she made it better. That’s what she does. When you meet her, she has that love to give. She has that will to change the world through music. And you want to go with her. She’s a great leader in a lot of ways, a soft leader, an inviting leader, a leader who immediately makes you want to do good.”

Greg Kot, the co-host of “Sound Opinions” and former Chicago Tribune music critic, is the author of seven books, including “I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers and the Music that Shaped the Civil Rights Era.”  A new, updated edition of the book will be published later this year.