MAVIS STAPLES
The rich tones of the empress of gospel-soul have soundtracked America’s social revolution, and its reversal. At 80, she pulls no punches.
Sprightly Mavis staples celebrates her 80th birthday on July 10 and has been whittling at that momentous landmark’s bucket list. skydiving? “they started scarin’ me.” a water sport? “i can’t swim.” Fast car? “that don’t impress me.” hot air balloon? “got to be more dangerous than that.” but skateboarding got a nod. it’s a favoured pastime of ben harper, who wrote and produced her latest solo album, We Get By, a heartfelt, political, angry, proud record, delivered by staples in that rich, rangy, deep, expressive, occasionally raspy voice.
arrived in london from paris just the day before, she’s relaxed, dressed head-to-toe in black casuals, and is ebullient company, as ever. how could it be otherwise when the world continues to provide so much raw material for the socially and politically engaged mix of gospel, soul, funk and blues that’s become her forte. it’s been that way since the age of eight, when her father, pops staples, exasperated with his gospel group the trumpet Jubilees, sat three of his children, cleotha, pervis and Mavis, on the living room floor and divided up the parts to Will the circle be Unbroken, young Mavis taking, as she put it, the “baritone” role.
pops’s signature guitar sound – country blues tremolo, tuneful picking – and plaintive voice and Mavis’s assertive phrasing set the staple singers apart as soon as they began recording in 1953 for independent chicago label United. Moving through the ’50s and into the ’60s with vee-Jay, riverside and epic, their gospel repertoire expanded, after an appearance at Newport ’64, hauling in the era’s cutting-edge folk, notably bob Dylan’s, and, later, rock material. a mid-’60s move to stax
saw the staples storm to global successes with a stream of gospelsoul classics such as respect yourself, the Number 1 i’ll take you there and if you’re ready (come go With Me). stax’s bankruptcy and the disco boom derailed them, despite a Number 1 curtis Mayfield-produced movie theme let’s Do it again in 1975.
but there’s been a third act: Mavis solo. On stax, tracks like a house is Not a home and i’ve learned to Do Without you helped her work through her divorce; later, with prince, she found a new audience; and in the 21st century she struck out on her own again, hitting a seam of gold with six studio lps on anti- produced by ry cooder, Jeff tweedy, M. Ward and harper. there’ve been dark times too, especially when pops died in 2000, and sisters cleotha (2013) and yvonne (2018). all are still present in her life: several times she mentions talking recently to pops or their family friend, the late Dr Martin luther King.
and so it’s with her father that we start, down in Mississippi, where as a boy he’d slip along to Dockery’s Farm to listen to blues guitarist charley patton.
Growing up, Pops lived near Dockery’s Farm in Mississippi…
Oh yes, he took us there. Pops showed us this big tree he and his brother, my uncle Sears, would hide up in when my grandfather was looking for them. His father was a sharecropper and that was where Pops met Charley Patton. He loved to hear him play. [Pops] was making 10 cents a day – he said, “Oh Mavis, that was big money back then” – and he would take it to a hardware, where he bought this little guitar, saved his dimes there until he had enough so he could take it. When he got it, he started playing stuff like Charley Patton. He showed us where he proposed to our mother [Oceola], she was 16 when they married, Pops was 18. That’s when he left Mississippi.
You used to stay with those grandparents in Mississippi at Mound Bayou [established in 1887 by former slaves].
All black town. I was a little kid, eight or nine years old. Pops would send Yvonne and I to Mississippi, ’cos he had four children [in Chicago] and he said we were wearing out shoes too fast (laughs). I was walking to school down this gravel road and the jukeboxes were already playing that early in the morning. All I could hear was (sings) “You-oo made me leave my hap-py home.” Buddy and Ella Johnson, Since I Fell For You. Well, the kids knew I liked to sing, and they pushed me out on stage, I started singing and this was what came out of my mouth. My uncle was also in the school
– he was about 16 years old – and he snatched me off that stage and pushed me all the way home to my grandmother’s house [and she said], “Oh, you singing the blues, huh? You go out there and get me some switches.” And she got started. “You. Don’t. Sing. No. Blues. In. This. Family. You. Sing. Church. Songs.” Nobody had ever told me what to sing. I never would go back.
In Chicago, your singing found an outlet in the family’s gospel group. How did the early recordings on United, like Sit Down Servant in 1953, come about?
I was 13, I think. This man had a little studio built in his basement. I love Sit Down Servant (starts singing, a still deep contralto). That record didn’t go anywhere, but we would sing it on television. I was a kid, I did whatever my father said. Now the record I remember was Uncloudy Day [1956, Vee-Jay]. I consider that our first song, the record that took us on the road. And I was sick when we recorded that. I had to sit down. My little stomach was hurting. And then, later on, it was my appendix. My mother and father took me to the hospital, if they had waited one more night it would have burst inside me. I had several close calls. I swallowed a tack one time; [it] got stuck right there (indicates gullet), had to stay in hospital for a couple of weeks. God has kept me going.
Sit Down Servant had quite an impact in some circles.
[That] is the song that Bob Dylan first heard us on. When we met him, Dylan said, “I know The Staple Singers, I’ve been listening to them since I was 12 years old.” And he quoted a verse from Sit Down Servant. He said, “Mavis, she gets rough sometimes, she says: ‘Yonder come old David, with his rock and sling, I don’t wanna meet him, he’s a dangerous man.’ I been into The Staple Singers, I have all of The Staple Singers.” We [met on] a television show in the early ’60s, we were in our early twenties, but I felt like a kid, I guess. On that show he sang Blowin’ In The Wind and Pops said, “Y’all know that young man is a poet, we can sing his songs.” We recorded at least seven Dylan songs, his songs fit us, they were message songs.
Your move from pure gospel into message songs seemed very natural. How so?
We were invited to a folk festival [Newport, 1964]. We hadn’t heard any folk music, but we realised folk was very close to gospel because folk songs was about love, gospel was about love. Pops told us, “We can sing those. I hear them very close to gospel.”
Slightly later in the ’60s, rock joined gospel and folk in the repertoire.
We had joined the [civil rights] movement in the early ’60s and started singing freedom songs and protest songs. Then Pops would hear songs like (sings Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth, which the Staples recorded in 1967) and we heard a lot of Dylan songs. Pops said, “It’s not like we’re switching over to anything, we’re still singing truth and love.” And anything our father brought to us, we knew it was all right to do.
As well as Pops, your other great mentor was gospel great Mahalia Jackson. I had heard her since I was a little girl. Mahalia Jackson was the very first female voice I heard singing gospel music. My father used to play big 78 records and he would only play males: The Soul Stirrers, The Pilgrim Travelers. One night I’m in my little play area and I heard this lady’s voice and it moved me on up into a different room where my father was. I sat on the floor and Pops said, “Mavis, you were rockin’. That was Sister Mahalia Jackson, you like her, don’t you?”
When did you first meet her?
By 11 or 12 we had started singing [in churches]. [Pops] came in one day and said, “They want us to open up for Sister Mahalia Jackson at Tabernacle Baptist Church on Monday night.” I got so excited. She had on this long gown, I remember beige brocade. And so tall. I said to her, “Oh Mrs Sister Mahalia Jackson…” because I thought her first name was Sister. And she laughed, “Well, how are you baby?” I said, “I’m fine. My name is Mavis and I sing too.” “Oh you do, huh? Well I wanna hear you sing.” I said, “Oh you gonna hear me, I sing loud.” (Laughs)
After you sang, did she give you advice?
I started to go outside, because us children, when the preacher come on, we go out and jump rope (laughs). She say, “You come here.” She felt my neck, my chest, she said, “Don’t you know that you’re damp? You tell mama to give you one of your brother’s T-shirts, dry, and put it on before you go out in the air – you want to get to be an old lady like me, don’t you? Sing a long time?” And to this day I won’t go out when I’m damp. She taught me how to keep my voice… She was my idol.
Did she teach you anything specifically about singing rather than just care of the voice?
No, no. That’s all natural. I never had no musical training. When my father left me, I said, “Oh daddy, I don’t even know what key I
sing in.” When I first got with different producers, I would have to tell [Jeff] Tweedy and Ry Cooder, “Just whatever Pops play on guitar I knew where to sing. From here (slaps heart) I sing from here.” I hated to rehearse, and one time Pops told me, “Your voice is a God-given gift, and if you don’t use it, he’ll take it back.” Scared me to death (laughs). I was the first one to rehearsal after that.
Later you recorded for Riverside and Epic.
It was amazing how people didn’t know what to do with us. One label told us, “I thought y’all was country.” We had never heard any. This producer on Epic [Billy Sherrill], he evidently thought we were country because he had us singing Cotton
Fields Back Home, and that put a question mark in my head then. I’m glad Cotton Fields didn’t go nowhere.
After Epic you went to Stax.
We already knew Al Bell because he was a disc jockey in Little Rock and he played gospel music, and he and Pops got real close. Stax and GE were bidding on us, and Al Bell won. I thought Al Bell was just the most brilliant and clever black man, because he was a black man in charge of a record company. And he really did good for us.
Why did he shift your recording from Memphis to Muscle Shoals?
I guess Al Bell had a vision. Steve Cropper produced our first album [on Stax, Soul Folk In Action, 1968], but Al Bell thought Muscle Shoals would have a better rhythm section [for us]. And all you could do in Muscle Shoals is make records. Nothing else there but record studios. You just have to concentrate on your music.
Al Bell was right about the studio band.
Perfect, those guys, Barry Beckett and Roger [Hawkins] and little David [Hood] and Jimmy [Johnson]. What killed me about them: [record] 12 o’clock to 8 o’clock, then it’s over. I’m in this little box, singing away, and I have to stop! “Let me finish, let me finish!” “Oh no Mavis, you have to go, time is up… Tomorrow, you’re gonna get us.” I was so angry with them one night ’cos, oh, that song was going so good and I was into it and they stopped it. Eight o’clock, gotta go. After that I told them, “I’m watching the clock. I’m not starting no song that I don’t think y’all can finish. So we may as well close it out at 7.15 or whatever, because I’m not gonna let you stop me again!” But, yes, they were beautiful, beautiful… Tell us about your first Number 1, I’ll Take You There.
When we made I’ll Take You There, the church people wanted to put us out of church. They say, “The Staple Singers, they singing the devil’s music.” I had to do so many interviews, all of us did, where I’d tell them, “Look, the devil ain’t got no music. All music is beautiful. God’s music. We’re not going to sing no garbage.” But these were older church people. I’d tell them, “Look, you have to listen to our lyrics. They’re telling you, (sings) ‘I know a place, ain’t nobody crying, ain’t nobody worried, ’bout the smiling faces, lying to the races.’ Now, where else can I be taking you, but to heaven?” And they say, “Oh yeah!” They just heard that beat [that made] the kids jump up. We weren’t trying to go anywhere. We were gospel singers. And I’m still a gospel singer.
How did you feel when Stax went under?
Oh man, that was the worst. We didn’t know what to do. I think we were the next-to-last ones to leave but it was just going down, down, down. He [Bell] was losing it, his hair was falling out. There were some there walking round totin’ guns. They were like gangsters. But they were all right to us, to my sisters and I. But that was the worst feeling. And to see Al
Bell, it was hard.
But almost immediately after that you had another Number 1…
The only secular song The Staple Singers have ever sung was Let’s Do It Again, Curtis Mayfield. It turned out all right. If you’re God’s children, he’s gonna take care of you.
With The Impressions and solo, Curtis had many inspiring social comment songs and gospel-based hits, like Amen. But for you…
[Let’s Do It Again] was for a movie score. Pops said, “Curtis Mayfield, I’m not gon’ say that! I’m a church man.” My sisters and I, we started working on Pops. Because we all wanted to hear our voices on the big screen with Sidney Poitier. But when he would sing it [live], “I like you lady, so fine with your pretty hair,” the ladies start (screams) “Oh Pops!” He would have this big grin on his face, twinkle in his eye, oh man.
After Curtis there was a drift to the Staples’ work, but your solo career was refreshed. I saw you in ’88, singing a couple of songs on Prince’s Lovesexy tour.
Pops said, “This man Prince has been looking for you.” “I don’t know no Prince.” He said,
“My grandmother got started: “You. Don’t. Sing. No. Blues. In. This. Family. You. Sing. Church. Songs.”
“Mavis, the one they call purple.” I had a fit. Prince’s manager, Bob Cavallo, said, “Yes, Miss Staples, Prince would like to sign you to his label. He’d like to record you, write songs for you.” I said, “Wait a minute. Write songs? I’m a woman, and I need songs with substance, I can’t sing that stuff that Apollonia and Vanity sing: ‘Oh you nasty boy.’ I can’t sing that.”
How did he adapt his writing for you?
We were doing a show at the Forum in Los Angeles. I told my sisters, “When I see him I’m gonna be real cool.” I see Prince coming down the hall, all dressed in white, white hat, white suit and boots, and I screamed, “Let me give you a kiss from my mother! My mother loves you!” And he says to Pops, “You can play.” That’s all he says, “You can play.” I couldn’t get this kid to talk. He’s painfully shy. He would sit there and roll his big eyes. I said, “How is he gonna write for me if he don’t talk to me?” A light bulb went off in my head. I started writing to him, I would write 13, 14 pages at a time. I let him into my life. I started when I was a kid. Telling him how I would love to go to Sunday school because my mother would dress me in a little cute dress, my little patent leather shoes and my leather purse. And the songs he wrote, there’s something in each of [them] from my letters. He wrote Blood Is Thicker Than Time: (sings) “We went to church on Sunday morning, dressed up looking mighty fine, the spirit came without a warning, intoxicated us all like wine.”
Did his death hit you hard?
Oh boy, when Prince passed I just went limp. I could not stand up. We were way out in the desert [Coachella]… The next day, [the festival] was packed and I let them know that my friend of seven years had passed, and he was my son. He would call me Momma Mavis. I adopted him. Somehow, I started sing “Purple rain, purple rain”, and the whole place was singing, and tears was just flowing. Boy, that was so hard.
“I talk to Dr King. I say, ‘I’m gonna keep on pushin’, because I’m the last one here.’”
You’d been even more devastated when Pops died.
When Pops passed, I was so depressed, so empty. I just sit on the couch and wouldn’t get up. Yvonne came by my house one day and saw how pitiful I was, she started telling me off, “Mavis! You get up, get off that couch, you know Pops would want you to keep on singing. What is wrong with you?” And she started saying some words that I didn’t even know she knew (laughs). I just sit there dumbfounded. But when she left my house I got up, I got off that couch and got started. I called Warner Brothers, Epic, but all the people were new. They just said, “No.” So I went to the bank and got my money out and paid for to make me an album [Have A Little Faith, 2004]. Then I tried to shop it. Nobody would take it. Just as I was about to give up, James Iglauer [Alligator Records] took it and, oh, I was so grateful.
Did you enjoy self-producing that record?
I really did. Because I was doing what I wanted to do, nobody had to tell me nothing. Picked all the songs, and the musicians. This was another makeshift studio in this guy’s basement, [co-producer] Jim Tullio, about 40 miles from my home, in a northern suburb of Chicago. We’d go over there three, four times a week when we had music to work on.
How did you meet?
Jim Tullio had written a song about one of his friends who was in the 9-11 bombing, and he let Levon Helm hear the song and Levon said, “Man, ain’t nobody can sing that song but Mavis Staples.” He faxed it over and I started reading the lyrics and I said, “Yvonne, when does he want me in the studio?” (Sings) “In times like these, we need to be strong…” After I recorded that, Jim Tullio asked me, “What are you going to do now Miss Staples?” I said, “I want to make a record but everybody’s gone from Chicago.” And he said, “Well, I have a studio, I can help you.” I even sent for the guitar player that used to play with Bob Dylan [Jim Weider], and he wrote [the song] Have A Little Faith.
You moved to Anti- where Ry Cooder produced your label debut. He’s a very knowledgeable guy…
Oh, I loved Ry Cooder. I loved his guitar playing. I loved his conversation, him and his wife. Ry went down in Mississippi and Alabama to gather up some information. He wanted to see if any of the original Freedom Singers were still alive, and they were, and they’re on that record [We’ll Never Turn Back, 2007]. He got Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the African group. I felt like that was the best I had ever done.
Around now you met your live band, including Rick Holmstrom, the guitarist you call ‘Pops Jr’?
When I let my old band hear We’ll Never Turn Back, it scared them. They didn’t think they could play it. Rick and his band had played for me in Los Angeles about a year before, [when] my band got stuck in Chicago in a snowstorm. They played four or five songs and then here comes my band, they made it. Ry Cooder told me, “Mavis, I like the band that played with you first.”
More recently you’ve made three albums with Jeff Tweedy. Had you heard of Wilco?
No. I didn’t know them. I had a show on the North side and all of the Wilco band came. About two weeks later my manager said, “Mavis, Jeff Tweedy wants to produce your next album.” I said, “I‘ll have lunch with him where we can have a conversation and I can see if I want to work with him.” And he was almost like Prince. I said, “Don’t tell me I got another shy guy.” I cracked a joke, and that broke it up. He started telling me about how he had listened to The Staple Singers for years because when he was 18 he worked in this record shop and listened to our music all day. Then he told me about his family, [his] wife and two sons, and about his father. I knew when I left that restaurant that Jeff Tweedy and I could work together.
Tell us about We Get By’s cover shot [six black children stare through a metal fence at a lush, segregated playground].
They sent me pictures by my friend Gordon Parks. I had about seven in front of me and my eye kept going to that one of the little girls standing on the outside wanting to be on the inside. It reminded me of my sisters and I. We used to stand outside, we couldn‘t go swimming, we couldn’t go in the park.
You were excluded from a lot back then.
Oh yes. That used to bother me. My father would tell me, “I have lived through this when I was a boy. I want you all to be strong, and I’m telling you how it is. Don’t go with your head down. Be proud. Stand tall.” And we did. But I hated it. And if we were on the road driving, and Pops stopped in the service station, there’s the coloured bath room and it’s filthy, the one they don’t clean, and I never did use the water fountains. I just wouldn’t drink. I’d get me a Coca-Cola or orange soda or something instead of water.
How did you feel when hotels were integrated?
We were at a Holiday Inn, and Cleedi [Cleotha], my older sister, and I were walking down the hall. Here comes this white man and told us, “I need some extra towels” (as if they were maids). And Cleedi said, “I do too!” He looked at us, but Cleedi and I kept walking (laughs).
How did you come to work with Ben Harper?
Ben wrote me a song about three years ago, Love And Trust, and I loved it so much. So, the next time I saw Ben I said, “You gotta write me another song.” He said, “Well, Mavis, instead of one song, why don’t I write you 11? A whole album.” When we finally got a date, he said, “I don’t have a full song yet, but I can send you my scribbles.” I said, “Don’t send me no scribbles!” And in maybe less than two weeks he had sent me two songs, and they were great. And he sent me the rest. We were in the studio for about four or five days and we had a full album.
The songs are both current yet connected to your past. The song Change goes “X is the letter, blue is the colour, we’ve gotta change around here”.
It is in the present. Ben knew what I’ve been singing all my life and he’s right on point with it, you know, “X is the letter…” There used to be a time when black people signed their name with an X because some couldn’t write. So X is the letter, blue is the colour – Democrat.
The line in Brothers And Sisters, “Trouble in the land, we can’t trust that man,” is very specific…
Yes. We want everybody to know what we’re talking about and who we’re talking about. This record is gonna be the one that change the world. Turn it around, because people can’t deny this, when they hear it. People are shootin’ people they don’t even know. It’s all the followers of this man. He has a lot of followers, they’re all like him. And I talk to Dr King. I say, “I’m gonna keep on pushin’ and try to get it right, to fix it, because I’m the last one here.” But this guy (laughs incredulously) he’s something. And he li-i-i-e. Just lie right off the top of his head.
You had a better relationship with his predecessor, Barack Obama, appearing regularly at the White House and at Kennedy Honours celebrations, including your own in 2016.
Oh, we were with him many times. I had never thought about all of this, how many times I was at the White House. I did the Kennedy, Clinton and Carter inaugurations.
John F. Kennedy!
Isn’t that something? They wanted gospel singers and that was us. I tell ya, I shook his hand. I didn’t have any words with him like I do with Bubba [Bill Clinton]. And the Bush family were nice people. Bush Senior, now he skydived twice. And one time I called Bush Junior “President Dubbya”. He cracked up. We sang at the White House for all the presidents [together] one time. But I don’t go near it now! Ain’t no more White House. It’s the Orange House now (laughs).
Mavis Staples’ We Get By is out now on Anti-. She plays at London’s Roundhouse on July 4.