Mavis Staples has been a gospel singer longer than Elizabeth II has worn the crown. During concerts, sometimes, she might take a seat and rest while someone in her band bangs out a solo for a chorus or two. No one minds. Her stage presence is so unfailingly joyful—her nickname is Bubbles—that you never take your eyes off her. Staples sings from her depths, with low moans and ragged, seductive growls that cut through even the most pious lyric. She is sanctified, not sanctimonious. In her voice, “Help Me Jesus” is as suggestive as “Let’s Do It Again.” When she was a girl, singing with her family ensemble, the Staple Singers, churchgoers across the South Side of Chicago would wonder how a contralto so smoky and profound could issue from somebody so young.
She is eighty-two. While singers a fraction of her age go to great lengths to preserve their voices, drinking magical potions and warming up with the obsessive care of a gymnast, she doesn’t hold back. Time, polyps, and a casual disdain for preservation have conspired to narrow her range and sand down her old shimmer, but she is not about to hum lightly through a rehearsal. A little ginger tea and onward she goes. Singing is what connects her to the world.
Sly, sociable, and funny, Staples reminds you of your mother’s most reliable and cheerful friend, the one who comes around with good gossip and a strawberry pie. Her cheeks are round and smooth; her hair is done in a copper bob; her resting expression is one of delight. “She is a ray of sunshine,” Bonnie Raitt, her frequent touring companion, said. “She’s never cranky. She has an abiding belief in God and His plan and believes the world is moving toward a higher and more loving world.” Staples has spent the past few decades lending her voice to a startling range of collaborators: Prince, Arcade Fire, Nona Hendryx, Ry Cooder, David Byrne. Anyone who has something to say, she’ll help them say it, in an inimitable gospel voice. One collaborator, Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, said, “All day long, Mavis is having a good time. She’s excited about making music and just being alive. I hope I have that energy when I’m her age, but the truth is I don’t even have it now.”
And yet life has its way of wearing down even the most radiant spirit. For two years, during the worst of the pandemic, Staples stayed home in Chicago—she lives in a modern high-rise overlooking Lake Michigan—and was, like just about everyone else in the music business, unable to perform or record. She watched cable news and saw the ravaging effect that Covid-19 was having on folks her age. She didn’t go out, and she let no one in. For company, she’d pick up her phone and check in with “the Twitter people.” The empty days went on and on. “Oh, man, I hated it,” she said. There was only one thing left to do. “I’d start singing around the house. Mostly our old stuff, the songs we started singing when I was a kid: ‘Didn’t It Rain,’ ‘Help Me Jesus.’ ”
The pandemic was the least of it. The passage of time has relentlessly winnowed the comforts of her old life. For decades, she performed in the cocoon of a family that was remarkably warm, loving, and coöperative. Compared with the Jacksons, the Turners, or the Beach Boys, the Staple Singers is a story free of dark drama. But now the other members of Mavis Staples’s family—her father, Roebuck; her mother, Oceola; her brother, Pervis; her sisters, Cleotha, Cynthia, and Yvonne—are gone. “It’s just me now,” she said. She’s left with memories of a bygone world: back-yard barbecues at the Staples place, with Redd Foxx, Aretha Franklin, and Mahalia Jackson piling their plates with ribs and creamed corn; starlit rides in the family Cadillac, touring the gospel capitals of the Deep South; singing “Why? (Am I Treated So Bad)” at rallies before Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered an oration. “Ghosts,” as Staples put it to me one day. “So many ghosts.”
We were having lunch at a restaurant downstairs from her apartment, and Staples was saying that even now she dreams about her family. Like anyone of a certain age, she has a quarry of stories she mines to explain the shape of her life. She tells these stories expertly, as if each time were the first. She is an entertainer, after all. But, when the matter of loss comes up, there is no sense of performance. She takes a deep breath and lets herself settle, as if to say, This is the important thing about me. Her father—everyone called him Pops—died in 2000, just after the Staple Singers were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She still misses him, she says, so much that he shows up in her dreams to give her advice: “And, when I wake up, I be so mad that it was just a dream!” Pops, a son of the Mississippi Delta, was the paterfamilias, soft-spoken and kind. He sang, wrote songs, assembled the set lists, booked the dates, ran the business. The sole instrumentalist in the group, he played a bluesy Fender guitar, surrounding the vocal lines with a spare, tremolo sound. For years, his absence onstage left Staples feeling adrift. “I was having a hard time,” she said. “I didn’t hear Daddy’s guitar.”
Staples tried singing alone for a while, with a hired band of musicians, and she let her sister Yvonne, who never liked being in front of a crowd, focus on business matters. But, when the loneliness got to be too much, Staples persuaded her to come back onstage. “Yvonne was with us on tour for about ten years,” Rick Holmstrom, Staples’s guitar player, said. “They had adjoining rooms. They were constantly talking and bickering. That kept Mavis from being lonely.” Then it became evident that Yvonne, like Cleotha before her, was developing Alzheimer’s. “When Yvonne got to the point where she had a hard time knowing where she was, or started wandering away from the microphone, it distracted Mavis onstage,” Holmstrom said. “Finally, Yvonne stayed home and her friend Penny took care of her. Mavis couldn’t imagine being on the road without family. I was worried about her. When Yvonne started to fade, I thought Mavis might retire.” Yvonne died in 2018.
Staples no longer goes to church on Sundays. She hasn’t lost her faith; she’s lost the habit. She still sends her tithe to Trinity United Church of Christ, in Chicago—Jeremiah Wright’s old church—but she hasn’t been there for years. “I can go in my closet and pray,” Staples said. “I don’t have to go to church. The church is a building. I’m the church.” She works out her deepest dilemmas at home, but with a little help. “The other day, I was talking about retiring, but then I thought, What would I do?” she said. “I just felt like, Why is this eighty-two-year-old woman going up onstage with these kids? I don’t want to burden nobody. Speedy, my road manager, has to help me get in the van. I use a wheelchair in the airport. Some beds are too high and I have to take a running leap! I talked to the Lord. I asked him, ‘Why am I still here? My whole family is gone. What do you want of me? What am I supposed to do? Have you kept me up for a reason?’ And the only reason I could see is to sing my songs.”
It’s impossible to locate the precise birthplace of something as various as the blues, but one of its most effective incubators was a ten-thousand-acre plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi, founded in 1895 by an eccentric white businessman named Will Dockery. At its peak, as many as four hundred Black families lived and worked on Dockery Farms. Most were sharecroppers who harvested cotton and a variety of other crops. Dockery was of Scottish descent, wore a dark suit every day, abstained from drinking and smoking, and believed in modesty and moral uplift. His plantation was a self-enclosed agrarian universe, with its own cotton gin, a sawmill, a commissary, a post office, and two churches (Methodist and Baptist). It even had its own currency. The sharecroppers lived in old boxcars and rough-hewn cabins.
The Staples family was among the Dockery farmers. Roebuck Staples (his parents had great esteem for the mail-order giant of the day, Sears, Roebuck & Co.) was the youngest of fourteen children. He was raised singing praise songs, but the blues was in the air—in juke joints and general stores, on street corners and in barrelhouses. Dockery Farms and the surrounding towns produced an astonishing crop of blues players, including Robert Johnson, Son House, McKinley Morganfield (a.k.a. Muddy Waters), and Chester Arthur Burnett (a.k.a. Howlin’ Wolf). Roebuck listened to them all. But the crucial progenitor was Charley Patton, a boastful, lusty, sometimes violent man who played guitar and sang with alarming ferocity. Long before Magic Slim or Jimi Hendrix came along, Patton entertained listeners by playing his guitar between his legs and behind his back. Roebuck heard him at the Holly Ridge Store and thought, “If I ever get to be a man, I’m gonna get me a guitar and play the blues.” As a teen-ager, Roebuck made ten cents a day feeding hogs and chickens. He put those coins together to buy his first guitar, a Stella acoustic, and soon developed a fingerpicking style that drew on all he was hearing around him. The blues, he once said, “got into me, and into my sound, and into my fingers.”
When Roebuck was eighteen, he married Oceola Ware, who was two years younger. In 1936, they joined the Black migration north, ending up on the South Side of Chicago. Early on, Oceola was a hotel maid. Roebuck worked as a bricklayer, in a steel mill, and in a vast and fragrant slaughterhouse that was known in town as the House of Blood.
Roebuck had moved from one musical mecca to another. Chicago was the locus of urban blues and the center of the burgeoning gospel scene. “I don’t care where anybody else comes from or what anybody else does, Chicago is the capital of gospel and always will be,” the singer Albertina Walker once said. Gospel music has sources in both English revival hymns and the spirituals sung in America since the arrival of Black men and women, but the godfather of Chicago’s particular brand of gospel—a genre both sanctified and blues-inflected—was Thomas A. Dorsey. Born in rural Georgia in 1899, Dorsey was a prodigy, a pianist who got his education in church pews and revival tents and his early work experience in barrelhouses, brothels, and bars. After moving to Chicago, around 1919, he built a reputation playing behind Ma Rainey. But he was intent on bringing the energy of the juke joint to more hallowed ground. In Sunday services, Dorsey encouraged handclapping, foot stomping, and improvisation. He was determined to defy the conventions of the more conservative churches and provide some uplift in miserable economic times. He’d had a hit, in the nineteen-twenties, with “It’s Tight Like That”; now, as the Depression settled in, he was writing songs in the mode of “If You See My Saviour.” In 1932, while Dorsey was on the road, his wife, Nettie Harper, died in childbirth; their child died a day later. In the wake of that tragedy, Dorsey wrote “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” a song that became so central to the gospel canon that Mahalia Jackson sang it at Dr. King’s funeral.
Dorsey helped construct the musical world in which Roebuck Staples and his family took up residence. Even while working exhausting days at the slaughterhouse, Roebuck made extra money performing at parties and churches: “I’d do the gospel on Sunday. Pick up three dollars at the joint, five dollars from the offering plate at church, and make eight dollars for the weekend and live high on the hog when my peers were happy just to get the three dollars. But I wanted to be playing only gospel even then.” For a time, he sang with a group called the Trumpet Jubilees. But he grew dismayed by the group’s indiscipline and decided to try something new, closer to home. One day in 1948, he gathered his children in a circle to teach them the church harmonies he had learned in Mississippi. The first song they worked on was “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a tune taken up by country ensembles like the Carter Family. In their living room, Pops drilled his children on that song for days. “Mavis was headstrong and stubborn,” he told Greg Kot, Mavis’s biographer. “It took her almost two years before she could catch on to her part.”
Staples acknowledges that she was a resistant pupil at first. “I didn’t like to rehearse,” she told me. “Pops said, ‘Mavis, your voice is a gift that God gave you. If you don’t use it, he’ll take it back.’ I was the first one in rehearsal after that.”
One afternoon, Staples and I drove around the South Side, passing through her old neighborhood, “the Dirty Thirties,” and beyond. She pointed out her school, the churches where she prayed and performed, the site of the Regal Theatre—the Apollo of Chicago, now long gone. But it was only when we drove past the place where she lived and sang in those first rehearsals that she really came to life. “When my aunt Katie came and heard us rehearsing one time, she said, ‘Shucks, y’all sound pretty good. I believe I want y’all to come sing in my church Sunday,’ ” Staples recalled. “We were glad to have somewhere to sing that wasn’t the living-room floor.” The next Sunday, the Staples family sang at a Baptist church in the neighborhood. The shouts from the pews—the ultimate currency of approval—were startling, but they also posed a problem. “We didn’t know about encores,” Staples said. “We just had the one song. So we sang it three times.”
Staples knew from an early age that if she was going to sing in public it could only be gospel music. Sometimes, when Pops was struggling to support the family, Mavis and Yvonne were sent to live with Oceola’s mother, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and one day Mavis took part in a school talent show there. Without thinking much, she sang “Since I Fell for You,” a jukebox hit by Ella and Buddy Johnson. When Grandma Ware found out, she was furious: “Oh, you was singing the blues, huh?” Out came the switch.
“I got the worst whipping in my life!” Staples said. “She sent me back to school with my little short dress on, my legs had pink welts. I started printing letters to my mother. I said, ‘Mama, I want to come home. Grandma won’t let me sing!’ ”
Pops was a stickler, too. Forget about the kids singing the blues: in those days, he wouldn’t even let them play cards. But he was excited about the offers they were getting after that one-song première. He taught the kids to sing “Tell Heaven,” “Too Close,” and what became, in 1956, their first recorded hit, “Uncloudy Day.” From the start, the Staple Singers were a distinctively old-fashioned group in the quartet tradition. Their haunting, down-home church harmonies reminded listeners of earlier times. “When we first went on the road, people thought we were old people because we were singing such old songs,” Staples said. The one departure from tradition was Pops’s guitar—a rarity in those days, and a “devilish” instrument to some. It was only later that many other gospel groups, like the Mighty Clouds of Joy and the Dixie Hummingbirds, hired guitar players to accompany them.
The old neighborhood was rich in musical talent. Staples developed a crush on Sam Cooke, who lived nearby, and routinely encountered the stars of the gospel world, including her role model, Mahalia Jackson. “My name is Mavis,” she shyly told the singer on their first meeting. “I sing, too.”
“Oh, you do?”
“Yes, Ma’am. With my father and my brother and my sisters.”
“I want to hear you.”
“Well, you’ll hear me, because I sing loud.”
In the early nineteen-fifties, Roebuck decided that the Staple Singers were a business. While Mavis was still in school, they would set out touring for long weekends on the “gospel highway,” a circuit of Southern churches, school gymnasiums, and V.F.W. halls. They crossed paths with the Soul Stirrers, Lou Rawls and the Pilgrim Travelers, the Reverend C. L. Franklin and his daughter Aretha. Mavis got used to finishing homework assignments in boarding houses and modest hotel rooms across the Jim Crow South.
At the start of their touring days, she said, “Pops sat us down and said, ‘Now listen, y’all, we’re going down South. It’s a different place. Everybody don’t like you. And there’s certain things that you’ll see that’s going to be different. If you want to drink water, if you see a sign that say “Colored,” that’s the water fountain that you drink from. And, when you go in the store, you have to be very careful.’ ”
Many Black touring acts carried a copy of the Green Book, an annual compendium published by Victor Hugo Green. The Green Book informed them where they could find gas, food, and lodging, and warned them which places had been designated “sundown towns”—dangerous for Black people after dark. Even so, trouble was always around the corner: random arrests, overnight stays in some dank drunk tank, white kids trying to run your car off the road. No one who’d grown up on a gospel lyric like “Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?” failed to make the connection between a crucifixion in the ancient world and the lynchings in modern America. Staples, young as she was, knew the score. In 1955, when she was sixteen, she read about the murder of Emmett Till, in Mississippi—not far from where Pops grew up—and tried sending a message of condolence to Till’s grieving mother.
When Staples finished high school, in 1957, Pops quit his job and declared it possible for the Staple Singers to focus completely on their music. Staples resisted, telling him that she wanted to study to be a nurse. “He said, ‘Mavis, baby, don’t you know you’re already a nurse?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Don’t you know that when you be singing, and those people come around crying and want to touch your hand, you’re making them feel better?’ ” Staples was not the rebellious sort. The Staples were now a full-time concern. “Uncloudy Day,” which the group had recorded with Vee-Jay Records the previous year, was getting a lot of radio play; they were performing before bigger audiences, on longer, multistate tours. (The Staples later expanded into gospel-inflected soul and pop, on Riverside, Epic, Stax, and other labels.) They even made guest appearances on network television.
Pops did not think of his family, at first, as a political enterprise, but he’d been listening intently to Dr. King’s sermons on the radio, and, while the Staple Singers were in Montgomery, Alabama, they went one Sunday to a service at Dr. King’s church on Dexter Avenue. In a meeting afterward, King made it plain to Pops that the Staple Singers had a role to play in the movement. Enslaved people sang “Steal Away” on the plantations and abolitionists sang “John Brown’s Body” during the Civil War, King once reminded a reporter. “For the same reasons the slaves sang, Negroes today sing freedom songs, for we, too, are in bondage.” That was the case he made to Pops.
The family went back to their hotel, and Pops called his children to his room. “I like this man’s message,” he said. “And I think that if he can preach it, we can sing it.” In the early nineteen-sixties, the Staple Singers started releasing “message songs”: “I’ve Been Scorned,” “Freedom Highway,” “Long Walk to D.C.,” “Respect Yourself,” “When Will We Be Paid?,” and Dr. King’s favorite, “Why? (Am I Treated So Bad).” Although they maintained their restrained sound, their lyrics grew more insistently political: “The whole wide world is wonderin’ what’s wrong with the United States,” they sang in “Freedom Highway.” Those songs became as important to the movement as Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” or the Impressions’ “Keep on Pushing.” This was a commitment that Mavis Staples would go on upholding. She admires the current crop of rappers whose music is saturated with both politics and gospel influence—Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar among them—and doesn’t want to sing only the songs of the civil-rights era. Disgusted by the election of Donald Trump and the bigotry it enabled, she teamed up with her friend Jeff Tweedy on an album of assertively political new material, “If All I Was Was Black.”
On those early Southern tours, stardom did not shield the Staples family from the cruelties that they were singing about. One night in November, 1964, the group wrapped up a concert in Jackson, Mississippi, packed into Pops’s Cadillac, and headed north toward home. It was Mavis’s turn at the wheel, and around 1 a.m. she pulled in to a gas station, in Memphis, and politely asked the attendant if he would fill the tank and clean the bug-specked windshield. She also asked for a receipt. The attendant, a tall, skinny white boy, ignored her request. As Staples told me the story: “He said, ‘If you want a receipt, N-word, you come over to the office.’ ”
Pops, furious, told Mavis to pull the car up to the service-station office and wait. He followed the attendant into the office, where they quickly got into a shouting match.
“Let me tell you something,” the white boy yelled, again using the N-word. Before the boy could continue his disquisition, Pops clocked him with a right hand. “Pops had this pinkie ring on his finger,” Staples recalled, “and blood spattered.” Pops, who was wearing slippers, slid on the greasy floor. Mavis saw that the attendant had grabbed a crowbar and was coming toward him. She woke Pervis, who’d been asleep, and he sprang up—“Pervis came from under those coats and out of that car like Superman!”—and hustled his father to safety. Mavis hit the gas, driving across the Mississippi into Arkansas. But soon they were pulled over by three police cars, lights flashing. The station attendant had called the police and claimed that he’d been beaten and robbed.
“They had shotguns on us, dogs were barking, big old German shepherds,” Staples told me. “They had us standing on the highway with our hands up over our heads. Then they handcuffed us and one of them said, ‘This boy here looks like he wants to run.’ They kept calling my father ‘boy.’ ”
In the trunk, the cops found a cigar box full of cash—more than a thousand dollars—and a gun. The cash was from their earnings on the road, and the pistol was legally registered. But the cops seemed convinced that this was evidence of a felony.
The officers shoved the Staples family into the squad cars and brought them to the local police station. “Pops walked in, hands cuffed behind his back, and this Black man is there mopping the floor,” Staples recounted. “He said, ‘Papa Staples, what you doing here?’ And we laughed about that way later—but we couldn’t laugh then.” The police captain, a white man named Bobby Keen, thought he recognized Pops from television—the “Tonight Show,” “Hootenanny,” he couldn’t remember which—and said, “My wife loves you! Is that you?”
“Yes,” Pops said. “In person.”
“Get them handcuffs off them people,” Captain Keen told his officers. Before heading back to the interstate, Pops autographed a few of their record albums they kept in the trunk for Captain Keen.
Six weeks later, the Staple Singers were performing at the Mason Temple, in Memphis, a major stop on the gospel highway. Mavis looked over to the V.I.P. area, and there were Keen and some of his officers. Pops said, “Well, Chief, it’s mighty nice of y’all to come out here to see us, but who’s minding the town?”
Earlier this year, I went to see Staples and her band at the Barns, a small indoor venue on the grounds of Wolf Trap, the performing-arts center in Vienna, Virginia. The fans who lined up to show their immunization records and take their seats were almost entirely white, and of a certain vintage. That’s typical of Staples’s crowds these days. If I had to guess, I’d say that most people at Wolf Trap first encountered the Staple Singers in “The Last Waltz,” Martin Scorsese’s film of the Band’s final concert, an all-star farewell held on Thanksgiving Day, 1976, at the Winterland Ballroom, in San Francisco. The Band’s guests included Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan, and yet the Staples stole the movie, without even appearing at the concert itself. They were touring in Europe. Weeks later, Scorsese filmed them on an M-G-M soundstage playing “The Weight” together with the Band. Gospel had been an essential spice in the Band’s musical stew. “We worshipped the Staple Singers, plain and simple,” Levon Helm, the Band’s drummer, told Greg Kot. “We tried to sing with the same kind of delivery in our harmonies. They were who we looked to.” During a break in the filming, Helm tried to pass a joint to Pops, but Pops demurred. “Man, I don’t want none of that mess,” he said.
In the movie, Cleotha, Yvonne, and Pops are in good form, and Mavis is at her best, giving “The Weight”—a surreal, country gallop—a spiritual lift. After Helm takes the first verse, Mavis takes the second and brings the whole affair to church. Pops sings the third verse in his sweet, whispery tone, the narrative oozing out of him like a slow, thick stream of Bosco. But it’s at the end, as everyone sings the verse and Mavis lags on the beat, with her signature grunts and moans and claps, that your scalp tingles and you think about the Staples, at their start, singing in their living room on the South Side.
Dylan had heard that sound at a formative age. Growing up in the Iron Range of Minnesota, he tuned in to the high-wattage radio stations from Nashville and Memphis, Shreveport and Atlanta, that blanketed the country each night with music that was far from the jukebox mainstream. “At midnight, the gospel stuff would start,” Dylan later told a documentary filmmaker. “I got to be acquainted with the Swan Silvertones and the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Highway Q.C.’s and all that. But the Staple Singers came on . . . and they were so different.” What shook him was the shivery sound of “Sit Down Servant,” a spooky, almost medieval-seeming song that Pops and his children had recorded in 1953. “Mavis was singing stuff like ‘Yonder come little David with a rock and sling, I don’t want to meet him, he’s a dangerous man.’ . . . I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness!’ That made my hair stand up. I thought, ‘That’s how the world is.’ ”
You can see black-and-white video of Staples singing that song in the early sixties. Pops is dressed in a dark suit, the kids in dark choir gowns. Mavis, a startlingly beautiful young woman, stands in the foreground. Her hands are lifted, her expression glowing, and then comes that heavy voice, a great rumbling from her deepest self: “I don’t want to meet him. . . . He’s a daaayn-jus man!” And, from a hushed chant, the singing picks up volume and pace, propelled by that warbly guitar, the slinky licks up the fretboard, a cross-play of handclapping on the beat and after the beat, until Mavis achieves a kind of scary, wheels-off propulsion:
Something otherworldly is going on; the voices grow as swift and strange as some kind of celestial railroad. If you were a kid listening to that song in the dark, on the Iron Range or anywhere else, you, too, might hide under the covers until daybreak.
Dylan arrived in New York in January, 1961, when he was nineteen. As he was building a reputation on the folk scene in Greenwich Village, he ran into the Staple Singers at a music festival in the city, and an acquaintance introduced them. “Bob said, ‘I know the Staple Singers!’ ” Staples recalled. “He said, ‘Pops, he has a velvety voice, but Mavis gets rough sometimes.’ And then he quoted that verse in ‘Sit Down Servant.’ ”
“I didn’t know no white boy knew our stuff!” Pops said.
As the sixties wore on, the Staple Singers broadened their repertoire. Pops, who was in equal measure idealistic and shrewd, saw a growing appetite, among white listeners as well as Black, for his message songs. He even had the group record some of Dylan’s songs, including “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Dylan developed what Staples calls a case of “puppy love.” On a cafeteria line before a performance, Dylan turned to Pops and said, “Pops, I want to marry Mavis.”
“Well, don’t you tell me, tell Mavis,” Pops said.
Staples delights in talking about it: “He was a cute little boy, little blue eyes, curly hair. He and Pervis got to be tight. They’d sit out on the stoop, drink wine.”
She describes their relationship as “courting,” with some “smooching” here and there. But, when I asked if they almost got married, she smiled and said, “Nobody almost gets married.
“I still have letters that we would write to each other. And the only time we would see each other was when we happened to be on the same show.” She went on, “I was the one that dodged a bullet. I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with him.” But, she added, “if I stayed with him in his life, I don’t think he would have turned to drugs like he did.”
Many years later, in 2016, Staples and her band toured as an opening act for Dylan. As a matter of self-preservation, Dylan makes a habit of keeping to himself on the road, rarely consorting with the opening act when he’s got one. This time was different.
“The first show, someone knocked on my door and said someone wants to see you,” she told me. “In comes Bobby. And I said, ‘Bobby, I’m so glad to see you. I been wanting to see you for so long.’ ”
“You should have married me,” Dylan said. “You would’ve seen me every day.”
Staples did marry once, and miserably. In 1964, she met a Chicago mortician named Spencer Leak. The Leak family was prominent on the South Side, and their wedding was a major social event. But Leak wasn’t happy about his wife’s stardom, and it didn’t help that they could not have children, a grave disappointment to Staples. The end came six years later, with Staples changing the locks on her door and Leak sleeping in the funeral parlor. Her next album, a solo effort, was called “Only for the Lonely.” Years later, she told Prince about her marriage, inspiring him to write a song for her called “The Undertaker.”
Staples is a canny retailer of her own story. She’s not going to get into a funk over lost loves and ancient disappointments—not now, not in front of you or me. Instead, she’ll tell you about when the Staple Singers went to Ghana, and a bureaucrat showed up at her hotel door with a note from a Ghanaian chief. “Chief Nana wanted me to be Wife No. 4,” she said. “We had all gone to his palace one night. All this marble!” The chief, she said, was “good-looking, but not good-looking enough for me to say, ‘Oh, yes, I’ll be Wife No. 4.’ I mean, what’s Wife Nos. 2 and 3 gonna do? Probably tear me apart.”
That ability to deflect, to find humor in complicated experience, indicates not a lack of depth but a self-knowing soul. “I’m always struck by how Mavis, no matter what she sings, no matter what the decade is, is always leading you back to the sound of the church,” Braxton Shelley, a scholar of music and the Black church at Yale, told me. “At the same time, Mavis always seems like Mavis. She tells that terrible story about the gas station and getting arrested, and she is talking about white supremacy, about painful things. But, at the same time, you always sense that she has woven whatever emotional pain she’s experienced into the fabric of her life. I don’t pretend to deep knowledge of her inner life, but there is a deep sense of pleasantness about Mavis Staples, which is a kind of miracle, you know?”
Because Staples is not eager to tell unhappy stories or engage in trash talk, you’re taken aback in the rare moment when she heads into scratchy territory—as when she discusses her relationship with Aretha Franklin. Staples knew the Franklin family for much of her life. When she was a teen-ager, Aretha’s father, C. L. Franklin, one of the country’s leading Black preachers, came to Chicago from Detroit to deliver his famous sermon “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest.” “I ran all around and around the church,” Staples told me. “The Holy Spirit had me.” It was, she said, like a “fire hitting you from the bottom of your feet.”
She became good friends with Aretha Franklin and her siblings. There’s no question that Franklin had a more powerful and versatile vocal instrument, and Staples, despite her ability to put over a song with an uncommon depth of feeling, has never pretended otherwise. But she always felt somewhat diminished by Franklin, and, after they teamed up to record a live church performance of Edwin Hawkins’s “Oh Happy Day,” in 1987, she felt outright disrespected. When the recording was released, it became clear that Franklin had turned down the volume on Staples’s vocal track. Staples said she just shrugged and let it go. “I should’ve told her, ‘No, just don’t put the record out,’ ” she said. “But you know me: goody-goody Mavis.”
Franklin, she admits, put her temperament to the test. “I put up with her for a long time till I got tired, you know?” Staples told me. “She was very insecure. I tried my best to be her friend. She would call me and ask me to call her back. When I called her back, the number was changed. So, you know, she was weird like that.”
Still, Staples said, “I’m just a happy-go-lucky, you know? I can get over anything.” Except deaths in the family. Through the years, Pops and Mavis were the constants in the Staple Singers. Yvonne, Pervis, and Cleotha moved in and out of the group; Oceola stayed home. The one sibling who never performed was Cynthia, the youngest. Cynthia suffered from depression. Kids had bullied her in school and pestered her, asking why she wasn’t singing with her famous family. Sometimes, when Mavis was in Chicago, she let Cynthia come stay with her and tried to cheer her up. “I pushed Pops to have Cynthia play tambourine or something for us,” Staples said, but that never worked out.
One day in 1973, when Cynthia was twenty-one, she was at home with Oceola, who was in the kitchen making supper. The rest of the family was on the road, performing in Las Vegas. Cynthia mentioned to Oceola that she’d received a check in the mail from Pops and wanted to write a thank-you note. Instead, she went into the living room and shot herself with a .38-calibre revolver. “We just never knew how bad she was suffering,” Staples said.
Backstage at Wolf Trap, Staples and her band prepared for the show as they often do, by singing a gospel tune, “Wonderful Savior.” Sometimes, particularly in the South, Staples might get a crowd that is racially mixed, but not often. It’s been a long time since she could measure her performance by the number of shouts and “amen”s from an audience; no one at Wolf Trap was likely to require a deacon to fan them back into consciousness. Those gospel theatrics and emotions belong to a different world. And modern gospel—whether it is Kirk Franklin’s hip-hop-inflected music or the vast number of choirs in churches across the country or Kanye West’s Sunday Service Choir—is not a presence for most of these listeners. All the same, Staples will sometimes have her guitar player, Rick Holmstrom, sneak a look at the audience. “I can sense a difference in her when we get an amen corner with even some pockets of African Americans—it changes the vibe,” he told me. “I’ll peek, and she’ll say, ‘How does it look? Slim and his brother None?’ I’ll say, ‘I don’t think it’s a “Weight” night.’ That means there’s some Black folks. We can lean on soul and gospel. A ‘Weight’ night would be when it’s a white crowd.”
The Staple Singers, like their leading Black brethren in the blues, have always had a reverent audience of white musicians. One of the first singles the Rolling Stones recorded was “The Last Time,” a hit in 1965, which is credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards but was inspired by a Staples recording from a decade before. Pops Staples didn’t mind; the tune is from a traditional gospel song. Then the Stones’ management asked the Staple Singers to open for them on their 1972 tour. By now, Pops had shifted the group into more popular material. Singles like “I’ll Take You There” might have displeased some gospel purists, but they widened the group’s appeal and made them wealthy. No matter. The Stones offered the Staple Singers a paltry five hundred dollars a night. Pops turned them down. “I’d like to think Mick Jagger doesn’t know about this,” he told a reporter for Variety.
Mavis Staples has no patience for segregation, in politics or in music. She is at once sure-minded about the essential place of Black composers and performers in American music and open to singing with anyone who can keep up. Over and over in recent years, she has been a presence in that gumbo genre known as Americana. Among her albums in that vein is a sentimental one called “You Are Not Alone,” recordings that she did in 2011 with Levon Helm, at his barn in Woodstock. Helm, who died in 2012, was suffering from throat cancer; he was terribly thin, his voice raspy and weak, and yet together they rise to the occasion, collaborating on Curtis Mayfield’s protest anthem “This Is My Country,” Dylan’s gospel song “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “The Weight,” and, yes, “This May Be the Last Time.”
Onstage at Wolf Trap, Staples was energetic. She put together a set that mixed Staple Singers hits (“If You’re Ready,” “I’ll Take You There”), a Delta blues (Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Got to Move”), and covers of songs by Talking Heads, Buffalo Springfield, and Funkadelic. She also did a ribald version of “Let’s Do It Again,” a song that Curtis Mayfield had to talk Pops into performing. “I’m a church man, I’m not singing that,” Pops had protested. “Oh, Pops, the Lord won’t mind,” Mayfield said. “It’s just a love song.” Commerce prevailed. Besides, how many hours are there, really, between Saturday night and Sunday morning? As if to deepen the sin, Staples got into a kind of squatting, hip-bumping thing with Holmstrom, and, at one point, he even used the head of his guitar to lift her skirt. Afterward, she scolded him, laughing, “Rick, you took that sin song too serious! You can’t be doing that!”
For the most part, the band stands back and lets Staples sing, giving her the space to move within the song and have her way with it. Holmstrom said, “Pops would tell her, ‘Sing it plain. Put it out there.’ She was once screaming a little, getting a little too much, and Pops said, ‘Just stand there and sing it nice and plain and you’ll get your point across.’ ” These days, she finishes her set with “I’ll Take You There.” She has performed that song as often as Dylan has performed “Like a Rolling Stone,” but she does it with such lightness and conviction that, as the audience sings along, you get the sense that she wouldn’t mind singing all the night through. At the end, Holmstrom touches her gently on the elbow and leads her into the wings.
When we talked later, Staples returned, as always, to the weight that bears down on her: the loneliness she feels when she is not singing, all the missing—Oceola, Cynthia, Pervis, Cleotha, Pops, Yvonne. I asked her if she thinks about the end.
“You know, I do,” she said. “I do quite often. And I wonder how I’m going to go. Where will I be? I’ve prepared everything. I have a will—because I have a lot of nieces and nephews, Pervis’s children, and charities. But I seem to think about that more now than ever. And I tell myself, ‘I gotta stop thinking.’ Speedy, he tells me maybe I should talk to a therapist. I said, ‘Don’t need no therapist. The Lord is my therapist. That’s who I talk to when I need help.’ ”
I asked her if she gets an answer.
“Yes, indeed. That’s why I’m still here. He lets me know when I’m right and when I’m wrong, but he ain’t letting me know about when my time is coming. But, see, I just have to be ready. If it comes tomorrow, I’m ready. I have done all that I’m supposed to do. I’ve been good. I’ve kept my father’s legacy alive. Pops started this, and I’m not just going to squander it. I’m going to sing every time I get on the stage—I’m gonna sing with all my heart and all I can put out.” ♦
