Music |
Mavis Staples
By
Published: Jan 01, 2007
Category:
Soul
If you’re of a certain age, this CD is an invitation to time-travel back to the 1960s. Not the ’60s of war protest. Or the ’60s of sex, drugs and music. This is the ’60s that came before that, when Bob Dylan was too young to shave, and Southern blacks stood up to fire hoses, and white kids rushed South to stand and die with them. Freedom. Equality. “Black and white together.” That long ago, oh so innocent time.
I try not to go back there. It’s too depressing. As with so many issues, my generation made a promise and kept about half of it. And the result is that for all the “progress” that’s been made, not a single one of us would trade our troubles to be poor and black in rural Mississippi.
So let’s go to the music. Roebuck “Pops” Staples was Bob Dylan when Dylan was still Zimmerman — from the earliest days of the Civil Rights Movement, his lyrics thundered from the mountain like Martin Luther King’s sermons. And his music was irresistible. Pops wrote songs that, along with his stinging guitar, made you want to jump up to testify with your body. And in his daughter Mavis, he had an incomparable asset: a gospel shouter with the firepower of Aretha Franklin.
To hear the Staple Singers was to know that there wasn’t anybody who would turn you ’round. That it’s a slow train, but it’s definitely moving on. That like a tree planted by the water we shall not be moved.
Now Mavis Staples has revisited that music. And the dozen songs she’s selected for “We’ll Never Turn Back,” make for the most passionate CD of her long career. To hear them is to be wrenched from the present to her childhood in Mound Bayou, Mississippi:
Every Sunday we would go to church, And this church — a little wooden church up on the hill, no organist, no piano, no music and when you sang, you would hear feet patting on that wooden floor and people clapping their hands — this church had such a good sound. Makes you move, you know? Because it has Soul in it, the spirit of the people.
If you don’t listen too closely, here’s your smart choice for the gospel purchase of the year. But why slot this into a narrow category? The producer is Ry Cooder, and there hasn’t been someone as sensitive to ethnic music at the controls since the glory days of Atlantic and Stax. So “We’ll Never Turn Back” is not just great gospel — it’s also a fantastic soul CD. And, with “99 and 1/2,” it offers a dance cut that could give even a bigot visions of three hundred million Americans jiving to glory.
But this is much more than archival music enjoying brilliant production. It’s a blunt attack on all the racism that endures. The day this CD was released, I read an article about health — or lack of it — in Mississippi. This is a state with the highest infant-mortality rate in America. More teen pregnancies than any other state. And improvement isn’t likely. When Haley Barbour, former Chairman of the Republican National Committee, became Governor in 2004, he promised to cut Medicaid. He has succeeded; 54,000 non-elderly Mississippi residents — most of them children — were removed from Medicaid in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years.
Mavis Staples sings bluntly about politicians and their lies, about promises broken and justice denied. She names the martyrs. And she doesn’t tolerate dissent: This is, she says, what I’ve seen with my own eyes.
The ultimate greatness of this CD is that it acknowledges hardship but refuses to submit to it. The music’s so strong and her voice is so thrilling you really feel there’s an inevitability to the cause of equality. And if you doubt that, there’s no way to refute her faith. “This joy I have — the world didn’t give it to me,” Mavis Staples has said. Believe it.
To buy “We’ll Never Turn Back” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “The Best of the Staple Singers” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Soul Folk in Action” from Amazon.com, click here.
