Music for Grownups: Mavis Staples Live

By: Richard Gehr | Source: AARP.org | 2008-11-13

For someone whose life's work was validated on Election Day, and who also chose the date to release her latest album, singer and civil-rights activist Mavis Staples was remarkably reserved on the subject when she performed at Manhattan's B.B. King Blues Club & Grill just five days later. "Thank you for voting," she finally said, adding, "We're gonna live life now!" And the next day, the gospel and R&B singer admitted to a radio host that no one had made her feel the way Martin Luther King Jr. did until Barack Obama came along.

Mavis Staples has been performing for more than 50 years. Her boisterous set revisited the impassioned days of the civil rights movement, for which gospel provided the soundtrack.

Mavis recalled being taken to visit Dr. King by her guitarist-songwriter father, Roebuck "Pops" Staples. "If he can preach it, we can sing it," Pops said to his children afterward. Protestors sang Pops' first freedom song, "Freedom's Highway," as they marched from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965. Dr. King's favorite Staple Singers song, Mavis reported, was her father's "Why (Am I Treated So Bad)." She sang both songs as though they'd been written to accompany the movement's most recent triumph.

Lacking a keyboardist, Mavis's three-piece group focused on the bluesier end of her musical persona. Her voice filled the room without amplification when she sang "Waiting for My Child," and she brought the house down fairly early on with her rendition of "Wade in the Water," a spiritual with a long cross-over history.

Rick Holstrom replicated Pops Staples's reverb-drenched guitar style, and a searing mid-set instrumental interlude gave Mavis a chance to regroup. The show actually differed little from her powerful new album, "Live: Hope at the Hideout."

Mavis's voice has deepened and strengthened over the years. At 69, she sounded more convincing than ever as she worked the audience into a frenzy with the Staples' early-'70s hits, "Respect Yourself" and "I'll Take You There."

Mavis began her show with Buffalo Springfield's creepy "For What It's Worth." She wound it down with the Band's "The Weight." It's difficult to imagine a more suitable musical representation of any presidential succession. What she felt about Obama's victory that night seemed embodied in every note she sang.

There was a lot of that going around. The day after the election, I thought it might be interesting to check out the Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra, who were playing at the Blue Note in Greenwich Village. The renowned bassist formed the group in the late 1960s as a jazz response to the Vietnam War. Playing a gorgeous 15-minute version of "America the Beautiful," they sounded as patriotic and optimistic as could be.

Later the same evening at the Jazz Standard, jazz pianist Jacky Terrasson performed an emotionally drenched solo version of the same patriotic anthem. In fact, it seems that no matter how they play it, our jazz musicians are finding America just a bit more beautiful.