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Before performing a set at Gramercy Theatre tonight, Mavis Staples told New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright about her 1993 collaboration with Prince.
“My manager told me, ‘Mavis, Prince wants to produce you,’ and I said, ‘Which prince?’ ”
Wright inquired about their working relationship.
“Well, I couldn’t actually talk to Prince,” Staples, who was wearing a black sequined jacket and gold earrings, said. “I would look at him, batting his eyes, thinking, This guy is painfully bashful. Painfully shy. He won’t talk to me! And then a light bulb went off in my head: I’ll write him a letter!”
She wrote him several, over a period of months. “If he has my letters today, they would fit in a big book. And he included something from my letters in every song he wrote for the album.”
Staples sang a passage from “Blood is Thicker than Time”:
As sure as Moses’ staff parted the water
As sure as Cain had to pay for his crime
As sure as no one wants to be broken-hearted
That is how I am sure that blood is thicker than time.
When Staples’s father heard that, he asked her, skeptically, “What does Prince know about Cain?”
Mavis told him, “Pops, the Bible is one of Prince’s favorite books.”
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