Occasionally, for reasons of fate or coincidence, sounds from the past converge in the present at key moments.
Consider the Staple Singers, whose gospel recordings starting in the early 1960s carried them through the next four decades and included secular pop hits including “I’ll Take You There” and “Let’s Do It Again.”
Lauded by musical aesthetes but less known among the public, the family quartet and its founder-patriarch, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, have recently seen new light shined on them that serves as a reminder that history sometimes needs a few decades — and a few unexpected nudges — to catch up with innovators.
There was Bob Dylan’s mention last month of the Staple Singers during his MusiCares Person of the Year speech, in which he praised the quartet — then composed of Pops and children Mavis, Yvonne and Pervis — for recording some of his early songs. Calling them “one of my favorite groups of all time,” Dylan credited the Staples, and specifically Pervis, for carrying his work to their fans. “They were the type of artists that I wanted recording my songs,” he said.
A few months prior, during the final episode of “The Colbert Report,” host Stephen Colbert signed off with a seeming non sequitur when acknowledging the thousands of guests who appeared on his show: “I’ve just got too many to thank. So you know what? I’ll just thank Mavis Staples. Mavis, if you could just call everybody tomorrow, that would be great.”
It was as though some force were propelling the Staple Singers into the public consciousness again, timed to coincide with the arrival of a pair of resurrected recordings. A remastered, extended reissue of their momentous live album “Freedom Highway: Live at the New Nazareth Missionary Baptist Church — 1965” documents a Chicago performance cum civil rights rally in the weeks after the Selma march, and the posthumous release of “Don’t Lose This,” the final record from Pops Staples, finished with the help of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and his son Spence 15 years after Pops’ death.
“Pops was something else, I tell you,” says Mavis, now 75. Before he died, she promised her father to guard the recording. She did that and more. “The record sounds good, and I’ve been getting good feedback, and I’m just so grateful. I can relax now. I’ve done what I’m supposed to do. I’ve done what he asked me to do: ‘Don’t lose this.’”
If “Freedom Highway” projects a glorious future filled with the promise of racial equality, “Don’t Lose This” meditates on a life near its end — yet somehow remains filled with faith that better a day will come. It’s this fervor that’s at the heart of the Staple Singers’ enduring legacy.
“I think it’s monumental,” says Tweedy of the group’s work. “A lot of music that we take for granted I don’t think would be there without them. I don’t think Dylan would be the same without them.”
The evidence is all over “Freedom Highway.” A recording rife with epiphanies, the album failed to make a commercial impression when it was first released through Epic and quickly vanished. Even Mavis didn’t own a copy.
Were it not for another twist of fate it would have remained an obscurity. While browsing online, Sony Legacy producer Steve Berkowitz chanced upon an image of the original Epic release on EBay. From his long affiliation with the company, Berkowitz thought he knew everything Epic put out.
Then, skimming through “I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the Music That Shaped the Civil Rights Era” at an Oxford, Miss., bookstore, Berkowitz noted author Greg Kot’s description of “Freedom Highway” as “one of the best live albums ever made.” That sealed the deal. After tracking down the record and masters in the vaults, Berkowitz and co-producer and gospel music historian-choir director Nedra Olds-Neal collaborated to issue the full, unedited recording, including a midset call for offering by the church pastor.
Berkowitz describes the recording as “tremendously important. Society owes them a great debt.” As well, though, he calls it “an incredible document of the family, in their home church with the people in their neighborhood and community.”
“In that house of worship and in so many across the country, black church leaders were the political leaders, certainly led by the Rev. Martin Luther King,” he adds. “This is the witness of it.”
Taken as a whole, the album reconfirms the vital role that churches served in organizing citizens to embark on acts of civil disobedience.
The long-overdue reissue of the April 9 performance at New Nazareth makes repeated references to the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. A jubilant program featuring Staples originals and gospel standards including “We Shall Overcome,” “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and “When the Saints Go Marching In,” the Staples and a congregation of hand-clapping, foot-stomping worshippers inject righteous fury into songs until they nearly burst.
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