The Gospel according to Mavis
Bob Dylan proposed, Nick Cave wrote for her, Martin Luther King marched with her: GRANT SMITHIES gains an audience with music royalty Mavis Staples.
There he was, Bob Dylan, down on bended knee, looking up at her through that mop of curls. She had his heart, he said, but would she take him as her husband?
‘‘I told him we were way too young!’’ says gospel/soul legend Mavis Staples, now 77, her speaking voice as worn and cracked and lived-in as an old leather armchair. She calls Dylan ‘‘Bobby’’.
‘‘He asked my dad first, told him he was in love with me, and Pops said, ‘well, don’t tell me; tell Mavis!’ So Bobby came out and proposed. I said: ‘No, Bobby! We cain’t get married, we’re too young!’ He said ‘You don’t have to cook. I’ll cook!’ He made all kinds of arguments against my excuses.’’
They first met on a TV show in New York during the 60s, but Dylan had long been a fan of her family band, the Staples Singers. A ‘‘period of courting’’ commenced. There were letters and phone calls. There was ‘‘smooching’’. But there was no wedding.
‘‘He was very serious when he proposed. We had courted and we were in love. I loved Bobby! But I said no. We were teenagers. If he’d waited on me, who knows? If I’d been in my 20s, we might have been married.’’
When we speak, Staples is at home in Chicago, just about to head out on a tour that will see her play Auckland’s ASB Theatre this coming week.
‘‘I still tour all the time. I went out and opened some shows for Bobby, actually, on a six-week tour last year. I said to him, ‘Oh, it’s so good to see you again’. And he said to me, in that snarly voice of his, ‘Well, if you’d married me all those years ago, we would have seen each other every day!’’
I love Mavis. I’ve talked to her many times before, and always been knocked out by her wisdom, her wit, her smouldering indignation.
At 77, she’s still as feisty as ever. Why is she still singing songs about peace, justice and freedom? Because the civil rights struggle is as real to her as it was in the 60s, when she shared stages with Martin Luther King.
‘‘Oh, yeah, I still got plenty to do! As long as I still got breath, I’m gon’ be singin’ civil rights songs. This world has been goin’ through tryin’ times. I watch the news and feel like I’m back in the 60s! Martin Luther King gave his life to bring us together, and now you got this man in Washington tryin’ to push us all apart again.’’
Ah, yes. Trump. A long-time campaigner for equality, compassion and social justice, Staples is understandably not a fan of the reckless bully currently occupying the White House.
‘‘I tell my audiences, my neighbours, everybody I know: ‘We can’t let this man win! We got to stick together!’
‘‘I believe the Lord put me here to sing my songs and try to lift the people up. With Trump in power, there’s a lot of people depressed today, so you got to do what you can to bring a positive message. I ain’t good at makin’ speeches, so I got to sing a song.’’
Staples has been putting her voice in service of her politics for 60 years. She started out singing in the kitchen, then church, and now, the world’s concert halls.
‘‘We did it to amuse ourselves, because my mother was working at night and my father took care of us, and we would all sing along with the radio. Then we sang a few songs one Sunday morning in our aunt Katie’s church, and there was a lady there from VeeJay Records. She phoned Pops and said, ‘You know, Staples, those chillun need to be recorded’. And a while after that we made out first song,
Uncloudy Day. It was the first gospel record to sell a million copies.’’
Mavis was on her way. And she’s travelling that same road still, though it’s getting lonelier, now. One by one, the great soul and R&B singers from the past have fallen silent.
‘‘Oh, Lord, yes. So many have passed now. One of the most shocking to me was Prince. I loved that man.’’
The feeling was mutual. An avid Staples Singers fan, Prince tracked Mavis down in the mid-80s, at the height of his own fame, and cajoled her out of semi-retirement.
He wrote and produced two solo LPs for her, took her on tour, featured her on his own recordings. Childless and unmarried, Staples called him her son.
‘‘Oh, my heart is broken now. I couldn’t believe it when he passed, and I still can’t believe it. It just ain’t right! He had so much still to do. You know that last tour he did, where he just had a piano and no band?’’
I do. I went to one of his last ever shows, up in Auckland. ‘‘Well, that tour, he featured a song of ours called
When Will We Be Paid? I was so glad, because he once made me write out the lyrics for him, he loved it so much. Now, I hear his music and the tears
‘With Trump in power, there’s a lot of people depressed today, so you got to do what you can to bring a positive message. I ain’t good at makin’ speeches, so I got to sing a song.’ Mavis Staples
just start flowin’. I got old notes he wrote me in this house, pictures of him. I got his old tambourine right here! And I got so many wonderful memories.’’
Staples was born in Chicago in 1939. Her father Roebuck, better known as Pops, grew up on a Mississippi plantation, learning guitar from delta blues legend Charley Patton before forming the family band.
Mavis sang lead right from the start, and her voice on that first recorded hit, Uncloudy Day, is astounding – gutsy and rough, full of pain and joy and longing, though she was just 16 years old.
‘‘Well, well, well, Lord,’’ she sings over some heavily-reverbed lead lines from Pops, sister Cleotha and brother Pervis locking their voices tight around her in support. ‘‘They tell me I got a home beyond the skies.’’
She sings of the afterlife with such conviction, it’s enough to make an atheist think twice. Other musicians were in awe.
Bob Dylan once said that song had changed his life, and was ‘‘the most mysterious thing I’d ever heard. I’d think about it even at my school desk. Mavis looked to be about the same age as me and her singing just knocked me out – so deep and mysterious.’’
Other singers made pilgrimages to meet her. David Bowie once came backstage, just before she opened a show for Prince, as nervous to meet her as she was to meet him. He sat and held her hand until she took the stage.
As with fellow travellers Johnny Cash, Solomon Burke and Al Green, Staples attracted a whole new audience late in life, her late career cross-over appeal because of two main things: an empathetic producer and the right set of songs.
She has made records with Ry Cooder, M Ward and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, collaborated with Talking Heads, Van Morrison, Chuck D and Arcade Fire.
Her 2016 LP Livin’ On A High Note features songs written for her by Neko Case, Aloe Blacc, Tuneyards and Nick Cave. An avid Staples fan, Cave’s song Jesus, Lay Down Beside Down Me imagines a seemingly pervy scenario in which Mavis and Jesus share a bed.
‘‘Oh, I love that song! Nick Cave wrote me a note and told me how he loved the way it had turned out. But when I first heard it – Oh, my God!’’
She breaks into song, belting out the opening lines: ‘‘Je-sus! Lay down beside me! Lay down and rest … your troubled mind!’’, then laughs long and loud.
‘‘You know, I had to think on it awhile before I agreed to sing it. I mean – the Lord is supposed to comfort me! How am I gonna comfort the Lord? It was a strange notion, but the way he wrote that song, well … I just knew I had to sing it.’’
Sixty years after recording her first song, Staples is delighted that there’s still such interest in her career, with far bigger stars queuing up to write her songs.
‘‘It’s amazing to me. I never put myself on any high pedestal; I’m just a gospel singer. But all these young songwriters, you know … these famous kids, they seem to really love me, and they know my music right back to the real early days. Sometimes they phone me up about a song and they’re so nervous, they can barely speak! And I ain’t scary, am I? I’m just an old lady. I could be their grandma!’’
Perhaps, if their grandma had marched through Alabama on picket lines, toured with Prince, held hands with Bowie, jilted Bob Dylan. That’s not your average nana.
When she gets here next week, Staples will be singing songs spanning all six decades of her career, she says. And people need have no fear that she’s past her prime.
‘‘My body may be getting tired, but the Lord makes sure my voice is still strong enough to do its work. Music has an amazing power to unite people. I look out over my audience and people are smilin’, cryin’, huggin’ each other. I ask everybody to turn to their left, meet a new person and shake them by the hand. We got a crazy hatemonger leading us right now, so we have to fight that. Just like the 60s, it’s love and resistance and human togetherness that’s gonna keep us afloat during these tough times.’’
Mavis Staples plays Auckland’s ASB Theatre on Wednesday.