Barnstorming
Mavis met Levon over at his place. Sylvie Simmons feels the love on newly released live recording.
Mavis Staples & Levon Helm ★★★★ Carry Me Home ANTI-. CD/DL/LP
THE FIRST time Mavis and Levon sang together was in 1976 in San Francisco – Mavis was with The Staple Singers, Leon was in The Band and the concert was The Last Waltz. The last time they sang together was in 2011 at a low-key show in a barn in Woodstock. On both occasions they sang The Weight – a song Mavis knew well, having covered it with The Staple Singers in ’68 and in her solo shows. It’s interesting to play those two performances side by side. The big, powerful Last Waltz version still has that communal singalong quality, in spite of the show being based around the break-up of the band. The main difference on this version is the courage and poignancy of Levon’s worn, husky voice as he trades verses with Mavis – the result of years fighting back from cancer of the throat and vocal-cords. The Weight is the last song on this album and the only one where his vocals are as prominent. You can picture him sitting behind his drums, “the best seat in the house” as he always called it, playing along, saving his voice for a blaze of glory at the end.
Carry Me Home was recorded on a warm June night at one of Levon’s Midnight Rambles – his ongoing series of intimate homegrown shows with his band and special guests. Helm had modelled the shows on the rural travelling tent shows he saw with his parents as a little kid, except for the travelling part, due to his health. One reason for the shows was to help pay his exorbitant medical bills. A bigger reason (according to daughter Amy Helm, who’s on the LP) was to keep him playing and his spirits up.
The 12 songs span a hundred years – soul; gospel; blues; folk; country; civil rights and freedom songs. Staples, having sung other people’s material for ever, doesn’t interpret a song so much as treat it like it’s always been hers to sing. Listen to the authority of her preaching on Dylan’s You Got To Serve Somebody. She turns a second Dylan cover, Trouble In My Mind, into a deep, rich blues. This May Be The Last Time – an old spiritual that The Staple Singers recorded in the ’50s and the Stones re-imagined in the ’60s – is slow and powerful. Mississippi Fred McDowell’s You Got To Move – another song the Stones borrowed – has gospel piano and country-soul guitar. And as for pure beauty there’s the old hymn Farther Along, sung a cappella, solo, until a choir of backing singers join in. Why this took more than a decade to come out I don’t know, but it’s worth the wait. Timeless and joyful.