By Tej Nagaraja

Mavis Staples
We’ll Never Turn Back
2007, Anti Records, $18.98

mart enough to reject a Bob Dylan marriage proposal back in the day, Mavis Staples endures. With her latest record, featuring selections from the Black Freedom Movement songbook, she cosmically plays with time—while transporting us to a bygone cultural moment, she sneaks the era’s sensibilities (spiritual, political, musical) seamlessly into our own. A bold move, it comes off as refreshingly passé.  

Staples is her father’s daughter. Mississippi-born Roebuck ­Staples was a self-appointed deputy to Dr. King, and the Chicago-based Staple Singers issued a singular soundtrack of liberation theology—their biggest hits produced by Al Bell for Stax Records, recorded at Memphis and Muscle Shoals—rivaled only by Curtis Mayfield’s Impressions. Musically, old-school “Pops” was relatively resistant (or blissfully oblivious) to the racialized genre-segregating regime taking hold by the early seventies, churning a hearty stew of what we call soul, country, gospel, folk, etc.; for celluloid evidence, note how the Staples were at home in both Wattstax and The Last Waltz.

Mavis’ solo career was never quite realized in efforts with Mayfield and Prince. With her treatment of these freedom songs rooted in Negro spirituals and gospel hymns, she hints at an exciting genre-transgression with her throwback musical inheritance, like few of her contemporaries (Solomon Burke also comes to mind).  

The album opens with the haunting blues “Down in Mississippi,” by another Mississippi-to-Chicago transplant, J.B. Lenoir. With dirge-like backing vocals courtesy of South Africa’s Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the first cut establishes the bleak theme of the precariousness of Black life, reminding us that narratives of uplift and inevitable victory were often distant or unthinkable in the minds of terrorized Black Americans. Dovetailing with this darkness, with humor and humility, Staples tells a story about her grandparents. The striking interplay of the oppressive political landscape and the personal family story, with laughs amid tears, encapsulates the powerful potential of working with these songs. 

Breathing renewed purpose into refrains that once echoed through churches, streets, lunch counters, and jails, Staples sings of broken levees and “rich man’s wars”—Katrina’s aftermath, in particular, moved her to make We’ll Never Turn Back. She cheered Kanye West, with whom she performed at the Grammys, for his famous statement, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” Here, she addresses her late Pops: “It’s been almost 50 years; how much longer will it last? We need a change now more than ever; why we still treated so bad?”

This is a nostalgic record. Mavis misses the movement, and the capacity of the church to give strength to individuals and families as well as move masses. A couple of times when she sings “he,” you can’t tell if the martyr she’s talking about is Dr. King or the King of Kings. The two most affecting tracks here are two she co-wrote. “I’ll Be Rested” patiently recites the roll of movement martyrs: Denise, Cynthia, Carole, and Addie from Birmingham; Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in Mississippi; Fred Hampton; and on. She’s backed by three original SNCC Freedom Singers: Bettie-Mae Fikes, Rutha Harris, and Charles Neblett. I listen to it as a movement recognition (“Presente!”), which it is; I also hear Staples’ weary solace in Christian salvation and promise, equally evocative.

“My Own Eyes” is, as the title suggests, a song of witness. She has lived to tell the tale and thoroughly earned her place at the mic. A remarkable and lovely sentiment that comes through on this record: she’s glad to have seen and endured Jim Crow (as well as its end), for she shared homes, streets, moments, laughs, and kinship that were special, of their time only, that she and others carry on in their bodies. And she’s happy (and generous) to be testifying to this history for younger generations.

Producer Ry Cooder, known for his work with Taj Mahal, Ali Farka Toure, and the Buena Vista Social Club, steps into the role guitarists Steve Cropper and Jimmy Johnson played on the Staples’ Stax sides. Cooder’s slide playing offers understated and welcome accent whether to a syncopated gospel or a marching cadence.

Staples recalls the guitar-rock pioneered by Rosetta Tharpe, and her album-before-last was a tribute to Mahalia Jackson; studied and steeped in the sophisticated technique and arrangement of congregational-style Black choral, she’s liberated to push its boundaries. Her gravelly texture on “99 and 1/2” bounces as much as Wilson Pickett’s lovesong version; “This Little Light” gets a swampy funk treatment. Staples is interpreting a songbook here, one excavated and shaped by people like Zilphia Horton and Guy Carawan at the Highlander Folk School, Pete Seeger, and Bernice Johnson Reagon and Fannie Lou Hamer with SNCC. The most important album of these songs remains Folkways’ Voices of the Civil Rights Movement featuring the Freedom Singers of the early sixties, mostly recorded in mass meetings. Staples’ intimate entry encourages and models a grounded yet timely riff on this canon.

Just as Frank Sinatra’s interpretation of Rodgers and Hart songs, or Ella Fitzgerald’s of Cole Porter’s, are definitive yet by no means exclusive in the American Songbook, so might the Freedom Songs and other movement music be respectfully yet irreverently approached. Recent Dylanology lionizes the bard for turning on and bashing the movement that had elevated him, a victimology narrative that sanctimoniously vindicates his cheeky individualism against a suffocating, smug left. Rubbish. As Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions and Mavis Staples’ latest demonstrate, not only can individuality, maturity, and personality flourish in a collective tendency or sensibility; being so at home can prove a precondition for facilitating the unfolding of an artist’s gift.