newcritics

There’s a moment midway through Down in Mississippi - the first song on We’ll Never Turn Back - when Mavis Staples begins to testify. Her testimony concerns an incident in her childhood, when she unintentionally led the desegregation of a laundromat in Forrest, MS.

She tells the tale in a preacher’s cadence, the way she must have testified during church performances with her father, brother, and sisters along the gospel highway in the late 1950s when she was a skinny sixteen year old with a contralto voice so powerful and deep that congregation members who had only heard the Staples Singers records where shocked to see that little girl singing.

That voice is a national treasure–although it’s signature husk has acquired a rusty edge in recent years–but it’s been largely absent from American music since the death of her father, the soft spoken creative titan behind the Staple Singers, in 2000. Even before Pops Staples death, Mavis Staples’ sporadic solo career had never gelled. She had always been Roger Daltry to Pops’ Pete Townshend–without him she was like a great actress trying to save a mediocre script.

Her best successes as a solo singer have come with classic material. Her record of songs associated with Mahalia Jackson (accompanied only by Lucky Peterson alternating between piano and organ) is fabulous. It’s also the best recording of her voice ever made, worth the price for the sound alone. (Hearing Mavis with The Staple Singers in pre-renovation Carnegie Hall is one of the greatest auditory experiences of my life.) Her version of Stephen Foster’s Hard Times, from the Foster collection Beautiful Dreamer, is a reference standard.

Her return to that kind of material with We’ll Never Turn Back, particularly given the album’s deliberate focus on “freedom songs” (gospel material secularized for the civil rights movement in the 1960s), can’t help but be nostalgic. In shape, theme and repertoire We’ll Never Turn Back is reminiscent of the Staple Singer’s early 1960s albums for Columbia, on down to the minor key-heavy, rock-and-roll rewrite of This Little Light of Mine.

But the brand of nostalgia on display isn’t sentimental or fatalistic. What Staples seems nostalgic for is the hard-bitten determination, dedication to purpose and willingness to fight that she witnessed first hand during the movement. (Among many political performances, The Staples Singers performed at a church with Martin Luther King the night before he was assassinated.) And the performances that producer Ry Cooder has elicited from Staples–laid over a bed of stripped down roots rock–make this the best album Mavis has ever made as a solo performer.

We’re entering the twilight years for even the youngest civil rights pioneers. Forty years removed from de jure segregation, American public schools have already raised a generation for whom the civil rights movement is nothing more than half a chapter in a history book and a day off in January. Before you know it the last of the first-handers will be passing on. The danger is not that succeeding generations will forget the facts of the civil rights movement. The danger that the historical arc of desegregation will begin to seem so inevitable that time will obscure the will, courage and human sacrifice that social change actually required.

To that will, courage and sacrifice, We’ll Never Turn Back testifies not only with Mavis’ personal testimony but also with songs like In the Mississippi River, an homage to civil right martyrs, and an appearance by the Freedom Singers–a mixed gender gospel group formed in 1962 to raise money for SNCC.

Additional Listening: Although all of the Staples’ classic secular recordings for Stax are available, there’s no coherent way to listen to the best of the Staple Singers–the gospel recordings they made for Veejay in the 1950s–usually just five voices and Pops’ tremolo Tlecaster.

Out of print CDs of the VeeJay records are floating around, but the releases, on the Collectible label, never featured the best sound or packaging. The best collection of early Staples stuff is a two-CD set out of England, Glory It’s the Staple Singers, although it’s packaging is almost devoid of information and its sonics are no better than the sonics of the Collectibles releases. Still it’s got all the classic songs–Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Uncloudy Day, I Had a Dream, and of course, This May Be the Last Time (from which The Stones fashioned their hit).

Columbia’s single disk set, Freedom Highway, culled from the three albums the Staples cut for the label, offers a cross section of material from the group’s “freedom song” phase, including the Pops original Why Am I Treated So Bad, a song Rev. King requested the night before he was killed, and the great title track recorded live at a church rally. Pops Staples incredible version of Bob Dylan’s Masters of War can be found on Great Day, an anthology of the Staples’ Riverside recordings.

Finally an episode of my long moribund podcast, Down in the Flood, devoted to Pops Staples and the origin of the Staple Singers sound can be found here.