I got a lot more to give'
With two new albums ready, Chicago's MAVIS STAPLES bristles at the
idea of retirement

By Greg Kot
Tribune music critic

August 1, 2004

One of the greatest soul singers of the last half-century is named
"Bubbles."

It says so in Mavis Staples' living room, where a certificate hangs
honoring "Bubbles" for co-producing the Grammy-winning 1994 blues
album by her late father, Roebuck "Pops" Staples.

Staples laughs so hard her auburn corkscrew curls start to shake. "My
nickname!" she proclaims. "My mom called me that because I had a
little bubble nose." She couldn't be listed by her birth name in the
album credits because she was under contract to a different label at
the time.

Everywhere in the South Side condo Staples has called home for 30
years there are reminders of a life well-lived, of a close-knit family
raised on hymns, spirituals and acoustic blues. The Staple Singers
arose from the gospel circuit to sell 30 million records and provide
the soundtrack for the civil rights movement with such signature songs
as "Respect Yourself" and "If You're Ready (Come Go With Me)." Among
the memorabilia and collectibles casually furnishing the singer's home
are Pops' old Gibson guitar and a picture of him and Hillary Rodham
Clinton at the White House, a Rhodes piano only a few feet from the
spot where Mavis and Al Bell wrote the Staple Singers' immortal "I'll
Take You There," and a trophy commemorating the Staples' induction
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.

And yet these are also reminders that Mavis Staples' life is moving
on. Both her parents are gone, and Mavis herself recently marked her
64th birthday, as the flowers brightening her sunlit kitchen and
family room attest. Her sister Yvonne remains by her side as her
neighbor and most trusted adviser, and brother Pervis holds down Pops'
old home in suburban Dolton. Sister Cleo, who lives in the same condo
complex, has been sidelined by Alzheimer's, effectively putting an end
to the Staple Singers' 50-year run.

But Mavis Staples bristles when the idea of retirement is broached.
She has not one but two albums ready to go: a Pops Staples album
featuring the final performances by the Staple Singers; and a solo
album, "Have a Little Faith," due out Aug. 17 on Alligator Records.

"It's a shame, us at this point, we still have to prove ourselves all
over again to the music business," she says, her effervescent demeanor
momentarily darkening. "You feel like you're being put out to pasture.
But I still got a voice, and I've got more inside me now than I did
than when we had hits. Look at what I've been through, and what I've
overcome, and what I have to offer to you now. What makes [the music
business] think that it's over?

`What would Pops do?'

"The Lord ain't through with me yet. I got a lot more to do. I got
work to do. So don't hinder me," she continues. "I always think, `What
would Pops do?' I learned from him that had I depended on what other
people think, I would have quit a long time ago."

The proof of Staples' feistiness can be found in "Have a Little
Faith," a blues-tinged gospel album about making the most of troubled
times. It began with a phone call from a fan the day after the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Producer Jim Tullio, a veteran of recording sessions with members of
The Band, Aretha Franklin and John Prine, among others, had lost two
friends in the disaster and poured his feelings into a song, "In Times
Like These." He called Staples, "one of maybe three or four singers I
know that could pull something like this off. I didn't want it to come
off cheesy, and I knew Mavis would give it credibility, believability,
soul."

Partnership begins

Staples agreed to sing it after Tullio faxed her the lyrics. Three
days later they were in the producer's home studio in Winnetka, and
their partnership began. She had been working on her father's record
when Tullio suggested she work on one of her own. But a solo album
wasn't a big priority at first, because Staples felt that her past
efforts to go it alone -- both in collaboration with Prince in 1989
and '93, and for Stax Records in the early '70s -- were unjustly
ignored and under-promoted by record companies.

"She was pretty disillusioned," Tullio says. "I don't think she was
planning on starting a career again." As Tullio began bringing in
songs and backing musicians to the subsequent sessions, Staples found
a comfort zone she had only previously experienced with her family.
Though she didn't have a record deal, the singer believed in the
project so much that she poured $50,000 of her own money into it.

"It all started with 9/11 and me looking for a way to contribute,"
Staples says. "If Tullio hadn't approached me, I probably would have
continued on with Pops' record. This is the first time in my life that
I really have been solo. I never planned to record without my family.
But when we cut `In Times Like These,' I felt we could make the type
of CD that the Staple Singers always did, a record that would send a
positive message and uplift people."

Sealing the deal was a song written at the 11th hour for the album by
Tullio and guitarist Jim Weider, "Have a Little Faith," in which
Staples turns desperation into a small miracle of determination,
wrapping up an album that embodies Pops Staples' dictum that "if you
want to write for the Staples, read the headlines." Balancing those
moments in which Staples uses her voice to punch a hole through
self-doubt and depression is "Pop's Recipe," a classic mid tempo
Staple Singers grind that recalls the fire and wisdom of the family
patriarch.

Pops, the 13th child in a family of seven sons and seven daughters,
grew up picking cotton on a Mississippi plantation and studying guitar
finger-picking with blues legend Charley Patton, before moving his
young family to Chicago in 1936, where Mavis was born four years
later. He drove his family through the front lines of the Civil Rights
struggle while they toured the Southern gospel circuit in the '50s and
'60s, befriending Martin Luther King in the process.

For all the optimism in the music, there was nothing soft about it or
the family. Instead of allowing himself to get run off the road by
young hot-rodders on rural roads, Pops Staples would drive the family
Cadillac right back into the would-be intimidators until they fled.
His assertiveness was passed on to his children, who learned about
life and music at their father's knee. Mavis Staples' new album closes
with "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," the first song Pops taught his
children when they would gather around him in their living room.

Mistaken for a man

It was at these homespun sing-alongs that Pops developed the harmony
lines for which the group would become famous, with Mavis' heavy,
older-than-her-years contralto assuming the lead; on early recordings
such as "Uncloudy Day," which turned the Staples into stars, she was
often mistaken for a man, or a much older woman, before audiences laid
eyes on the diminutive teenager. The family was touring the gospel
circuit before Mavis was out of high school, and the combination of
her robust leads, Yvonne's second-lead vocals, Cleo's soprano and
Pops' spidery guitar figures gave the Staples a sound like no other
vocal group's.

Though the Staples' voices were steeped in the Baptist church hymns of
their youth, there was always the strong influence of blues and
country, and later they were swept up in the folk movement during the
Civil Rights era. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez worshiped the Staples, whose
songs began to cross over to R&B and then pop radio in the '60s and
'70s. For this "betrayal," the Staples were sometimes taken to task by
members of the gospel community.

"They got on our cases for `I'll Take You There,' because it got
played across the board on radio, " Mavis Staples says. "They said we
were doing the `devil's music,' but I said, `The devil doesn't have
any music. All music is God's music.' Listen to the lyrics in our
songs: `I know a place, ain't nobody crying, ain't nobody worried';
`If you're ready, come go with me'; `Reach out, touch a hand, make a
friend if you can.' These are songs about the world, but they're also
about God being alive for us in the world."

`Everyone was in tears'

In that respect, "Have a Little Faith" picks up exactly where the
Staples left off. For Bruce Iglauer, who signed Staples to his
Chicago-based blues label, Alligator Records, he couldn't have dreamed
it better. "It's one of the most overtly spiritual records we've ever
released, and it's by an artist I never thought this company would be
good enough, big enough or powerful enough to ever sign," he says.

Iglauer says he went to see Staples perform at a blues festival in
Pennsylvania last weekend and was blown away. The showstopper was a
song called "God Is Not Sleeping," a centerpiece of the new album.
Staples was spent at the end of the performance, and so was the
audience. "Everyone was in tears," Iglauer says. "To call it artistry
doesn't cover it. She just swept everyone up in her emotions."

Tullio got a similar rush watching Staples record the album. "I was
asking myself, `Is this really happening?'" he says. "With most
singers, there are usually a number of flubbed notes in every
performance, and you have to patch things together. But with Mavis it
was great, greater and greatest. She says she doesn't `know' music,
but knowing music has nothing to do with it. She knows as much about
music as Beethoven did, in her heart."

An impressive fan club

Mavis Staples talks about two of her biggest fans:

Bob Dylan: "When we met him in New York in the early '60s, he knew our
songs. He said he was 12 when he first heard us, and we later recorded
six or seven Dylan tunes. Pops was crazy about him. One day he told
Daddy, in front of everybody, `Pops, I want to marry Mavis.' Pops
says, `Well, go ask Mavis.' He says, `I love you Mavis, I want to
marry you.' And we started courting. We were about a year apart in
age, and this went on for six, seven years; we would write each other
and call, and see each other occasionally. In '69, I stopped the
relationship. It was always in my mind that I can't marry a white guy.
I was so young and stupid. All I had to do is look around. We had
plenty of white people marching with us. Dr. King loved that. So why
would it be a problem marrying Bob Dylan? To this day, I could kick
myself, because we were really in love. It was one I lost."

Prince: "The first CD we did together [`Time Waits for No One' in
1989], I told him I wanted to sing secular songs: I've been married,
I've had heartache, I want to sing about my life as a woman. But the
disc jockeys were saying that Prince is trying to make a female Prince
out of Mavis, and they didn't like it. The second one [`The Voice' in
1993], he took my letters and wrote my life. I would write 14-,
15-page letters on a yellow legal pad to him. I started from my
childhood, and every song he wrote for me for that album I'd hear
something that was in my letters. `Blood Is Thicker Than Time' is a
song he wrote for my family, and I had to stop about three times
singing that song, I couldn't get through it, because my mother had
passed. My daddy was amazed about the Cain and Abel reference in
there. I said, `Daddy, one of his favorite books is the Bible.' I
didn't know him to be a bad boy, the way so many people think of him.
I feel like he's my adopted son in a way."

- -- Greg Kot
Copyright ) 2004, Chicago Tribune

laurarichardson said:

That's really sweet.

That is sweet. I remember Patti Labelle on TV once say that she considered Prince to be "one of my sons".

laurarichardson said:

I had no idea!!! Wonder how that woulda worked out....?

Of course, it would've meant that the 'Desire' album ended with Bob singing: "Maaaaay-vissss, oh-oh, Maaaaay-vissss....."
(Funnier if you know the song.....)