Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from I'll Take You There: Mavis Staples, The Staples Singers, and the March Up Freedom's Highway by Greg Kot (@2014 by Greg Kot).

To fans of the Staples Singers in the '60s, the relative anonymity of Mavis Staples was puzzling. With an improbably deep voice bursting out of a diminutive five-foot frame, she projected the deepest commitment to whatever she was singing, losing herself in every word as though reliving a critical moment in her personal story.

And yet she still wasn't a marquee name like Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Diana Ross, and Dusty Springfield. Part of this was by design—Mavis enjoyed singing with her family and preferred to melt into the group. Even when her father brought her out front to sing lead after her brother Pervis's voice changed in the '50s, she did so reluctantly. "I loved singing those baritone harmonies, I always thought that was the best job you could have," Mavis said. She also felt a certain comfort being guided by her father, who had essentially taught her how and what to sing. Little had changed in the decades since, even as it was apparent that Mavis had star power. "Mavis was and is a quartet singer," says Anthony Heilbut. "From a very early age she grew up singing harmony or singing lead in a group with four voices and her father's guitar. She was trained to sing with the guitar, whereas Aretha sang with the piano. It's a very different approach."

Not only that, Pops's idiosyncratic guitar style made it difficult for Mavis to easily adapt to a different context. So, too, was the unspoken communication between Mavis and her siblings, the way they harmonized with her, even the way they clapped hands together, a high-speed ripple that approximated an entire percussion section by itself. "I've been singing a long time," Mavis says, "and I could never find anyone to clap like Pervis and Cleedi."

But Al Bell never forgot the day in Arkansas when the teenage Mavis's voice bowled him over and left him in tears in what was essentially a solo performance of "On My Way to Heaven" during a Staples Singers show.

"In signing the Staples Singers, I thought of it as signing three acts in one," Bell says. "I wanted to record Pops and Mavis as solo artists. I knew it would add more to them from a personal appearance standpoint, bring them a broader, more diverse audience. I would hear Pops sitting around and just playing his guitar at Stax Records and I thought, 'I've got to get this man down on tape.' His singing, I knew there was a lot more songs that could have been done with Pops as a vocalist, because he was so distinctive. With Mavis I saw no boundaries at all—I saw her walking past all of them."

Steve Cropper had already won the Staples family's trust while recording Soul Folk in Action, so Bell had him produce what would be Mavis's self-titled debut album.

"The attitude at Stax was that she's a superstar who nobody really knows about, and we have to figure out how to get her out there," Cropper recalls. "But it wasn't easy, because she puts limits on herself. There were only certain songs she would try. Her upbringing, her feeling about what songs would or wouldn't go down with Pops, gave me the impression she didn't want to go too far too fast. So I approached the whole thing with kid gloves. I didn't want to lose her trust or do something damaging."

Cropper found Pops a thoughtful and willing collaborator in the studio, but there was no question his word still counted more than anyone else's in the family, even though his children were well into adulthood. "Every now and then, Mavis would reference Pops in terms of putting his foot down about dating," Cropper says. "There were lines he didn’t want to cross when it came to his family’s well-being, and that included what kind of songs they would sing, what message they would put out."

The guitarist knew he was running a risk presenting Mavis with a set of secular songs that didn't have any of the gospel or message-oriented underpinnings favored by Pops and the Staples Singers. Whereas her first attempt at cutting a solo single, a cover of "Crying in the Chapel" for Epic Records, had some tenuous religious imagery, the tracks chosen for the Mavis Staples solo album were the sort of pop-oriented love and relationship songs that Pops typically shunned.

But Mavis was hardly insulated from the pop world as a fan and listener. She swooned over Sam Cooke's "You Send Me" the first time she heard it, and her cover of it on her debut album sounds wistful, as if she were singing both to a newfound love and Cooke's memory.