“After doing We’ll Never Turn Back, I really had no idea what direction I was going in,” Staples recalls down the line from her home in Chicago. “People were asking me, ‘What are you going to do now?’ I didn’t have a clue. I was so grateful to Jeff Tweedy; he had the answer. He gave me these songs to listen to and they are what we chose the album from.”
In a career that has spanned half a century and began with her beloved father Pops (Roebuck) Staples as part of The Staples Singers, Mavis Staples has become a legend in R&B/gospel music and a bona fide musical force in the American Civil Rights Movement.
“Some people say that things are different now, but to me it looks just the same,” she says with some resignation. “Nothing has changed – the Civil Rights Movement, the struggle, lives on. There are songs that still need to be heard. And the songs on those albums are to inspire the people from the struggle. So I’m still doing what I’ve been singing about all my life.”
You Are Not Alone and One True Vine featured songs written by Tweedy, John Fogerty, Allen Toussaint, Nick Lowe and George Clinton. Looking back on the 2010 release, Randy Newman’s Losing You has proven especially moving for Staples.
“That song, in my mind, went straight to my father,” she says of Pops, who died in 2000. “I’ll never get over losing my father. I can get over losing my pet; I can get over losing my husband or my car. But my father, who I sang with for over 50 years? I’ll never get over that. And that is how I sing that song. For my father.”
It was Tweedy who encouraged the singer to re-record some of Pops’ material from his final recording sessions in 1999, culminating in this year’s posthumous Pops Staples release Don’t Lose This. Clearly, Staples is not merely singing those songs, but reaching out to her father. “I said, ‘Tweedy, you would be doing the best thing you could do for me if you let me sing some of my father’s songs’,” she explains.
The albumis named after the phrase Pops uttered to Staples about the recordings before his death – “Don’t lose this” – so it’s another dream come true. Staples recently wrote on her website: “I would break into tears anytime I heard Pops’ voice on these records. There never was a point that we didn’t want to release them; it was just the timing. I knew that the record needed tweaking, so I said, ‘Who else to help me with this but my friend Jeff Tweedy’?”
Outside music, Staples has been a passionate supporter of Barack Obama. Times continue to be tough, in light of the obstacles thrown at him by his detractors and the civil rights issues that continue to dog the US to this day. As a civil rights singer and activist, Staples remains as she has been her whole life: hopeful.
“I still have hope,” she says. “We have to pray that Obama will have strength, that the Lord will give him strength, to continue pushing on. But I still feel that’s he’s going to be fine. As many who have pulled against him, there are triple that many that are still for him. I still feel that there’s hope and that everything’s gonna be alright.”
BY BOB GORDON
