Mavis Staples

Mavis Staples (born July 10, 1939, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) American gospel and soul singer who was an integral part of the Staple Singers as well as a successful solo artist.

At age 11, Staples joined the Staple Singers, a family gospel-singing group led by her father, Roebuck (“Pops”) Staples. As a high school graduate in 1957, she had aspirations of becoming a nurse, but her father persuaded her to stay with the group, which recorded several gospel hits by the early 1960s. The Staple Singers’ transition to soul and rhythm and blues began in the late 1960s, when they signed with Stax Records—the same label on which Staples recorded her solo debut, Mavis Staples, in 1969. Her second solo effort, Only for the Lonely (1970), included the hit “I Have Learned to Do Without You,” but it was the Staple Singers’ string of Top 40 hits in the 1970s that made Staples and her family true pop stars. Her solo albums of the late 1970s and ’80s did not fare well as she experimented unsuccessfully with disco and electro-pop. Time Waits for No One (1989) and The Voice (1993), despite critics’ praise, also failed to prosper, and Staples’s struggle to find a suitable outlet for her music continued. In 1996 she recorded Spirituals and Gospel: Dedicated to Mahalia Jackson in honour of Jackson, a close friend and role model. Staples curtailed her musical activity as her father’s health declined in the late 1990s. Her first recordings after his death in December 2000 were collaborations with other artists, including Bob Dylan and Los Lobos. Her duet with Dylan, “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” (2003), was nominated for a Grammy Award.

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In 2004 Staples returned to the studio to record Have a Little Faith as a tribute to her father, whose influence—musical, parental, and spiritual—was everywhere evident on the album. Included on it was Staples’s rendition of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a favourite of her father’s, as well as “Pops Recipe,” which incorporated in its lyrics biographical details from the elder Staples’s life and cherished examples of his fatherly advice. Have a Little Faith was a surprise hit, and it won the W.C. Handy awards for best blues album and best soul blues album. Staples also received the award for best female soul blues artist in 2005. These awards were her first as a solo performer. In 2005 the smoky-voiced Staples was also nominated for a Grammy Award for best gospel performance for her duet with Dr. John, “Lay My Burden Down” (2004), and she accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy on behalf of the Staple Singers.

Her return to form was further confirmed by We’ll Never Turn Back (2007). Featuring guest performances by Ry Cooder and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, this collection of reinvented gospel classics played brilliantly to the strengths of Staples’s voice and Cooder’s guitar. Although her live performances were legendary, she had never released a concert album prior to Hope at the Hideout (2008), recorded at a small venue in her hometown of Chicago. Staples’s set list, grounded in civil rights anthems and freedom songs, could function as a sort of short course in African American history over the previous half century, and the concert album’s title, which echoed one of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign slogans, and its release date (November 4, 2008, the day of the presidential election) indicate that Staples considered herself a witness to history.

In 2010 Staples released You Are Not Alone, a collection of gospel standards and new songs that was produced by Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy. It was a critical success, and the following year Staples’s long Grammy drought finally came to an end when You Are Not Alone was awarded the Grammy Award for best Americana album. Her subsequent albums included One True Vine (2013) and If All I Was Was Black (2017), both of which were produced by Tweedy. A rendition of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” from Staples’s 2015 EP Your Good Fortune, won a Grammy for best American roots performance. In 2019 she released the concert album Live in London as well as the resonant We Get By, written and produced by Ben Harper. She received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2016.