Mavis Staples hopes Barack Obama will finish what Martin Luther King started
The jazz writer Francis Edgar Stanley Bow one time described the sound of the Staple fibre Singers as "pleasure and roar". From the 50s, the family group, light-emitting diode by Roebuck "Pops" Staples, married a grumble gospel with soul and blues and politics, creating hits such as I'll Direct You There and Respect Yourself. Today, only Turdus philomelos, the youngest member, continues to perform; her father-God died in 2000, her brother Pervis has retired, her sister Cleotha suffers from Alzheimer's, patch her other sister, Yvonne, sings occasional fill-in on term of enlistment. So it is reassuring to discover Mavis Staples' mightily new album, recorded with Ry Cooder, Ladysmith Lightlessness Mambazo and the Master copy Freedom Singers: that distinctive voice is stillness thither - still joyful, hush thunderous.
This afternoon, Staples recalls the day the chairwoman of her record book company suggested she phonograph recording an album of freedom songs. She was sceptical. "I said, 'D'you retrieve people want to find out exemption songs today?'" But she soon realised, she says, the speciality of the mind: "Because Dr King, he brought us a powerful long way, just the bigotry, the shabbiness, it's altogether still here." She looks ferocious, in venom of her pay off and pale pink scarf. "We're freer, just we're not match - in our jobs, our schooling, we're distillery at the merchantman of the totem celestial pole. And Dr Business leader, his dream is non being realised."The music of the Basic Singers soundtracked the civil rights motion: it was their songs that were sung on dissent marches; Martin Martin Luther World-beater was a close booster of Pops Staples. "Pop, he always told the songwriters: if you wanna write for the Staples, study the headlines," she says. "'Cause we wanna sing about what's occurrent in the worldly concern. And this is still occurrent." She shakes her head with discouragement. "Every time I pluck up the paper. In Chicago today, a negro family throne move into a neighborhood, and they get down altogether settled in and the next morning they wake up up, their garage is spraypainted: n-word, take come out of the closet. It's terrifying. I looked at [Hurricane] Katrina, I had flashbacks. My baby and I, we finger it from time to fourth dimension - the girl behind the desk, she'll see us standing in that respect looking right on at her, just she'll wait on the white mortal. And I'm easily, merely Yvonne, she won't read it. She'll say, 'Well, await a minute! We're next! Don't try that!'"Staples had never worked with Ry Cooder earlier, though he had produced more or less of her father's material. He visited her in Boodle, and they sat at her dining room table choosing songs for the record album. She was amazed, she says, by how easily they worked in concert in the studio. "[He] played a lot of my father's licks," she explains. "He plugged into Pops' amplifier, he sits plump for and he starts strumming, the saame sound my father was performing on his guitar. And I said, 'Aw shucks, this is gonna be good!' Ah girl, I was reminiscing - it was like I was sightedness a picture in my question."These reminiscences ar delivered over the songs like freestyle poetry, and cover the time Staples number one became aware of racial segregation (individual remonstrated with her for most drinking from a t. H. White boozing fountain when she was ashcan School); the meter the Staple Singers were arrested in AR; and the occasion when she inadvertantly integrated a laundromat in MS. "I was shoot down in Mississippi visiting my granddad," she recalls, "and I went up to the launderette. I didn't have it off there was a edward D. White position and a black side, simply I went in and I happened to go in the inkiness side, and altogether the machines were taken. And I said, 'I can't wait!' So I was on my way back to my grandfather's and on the way of life I passed the white side; barely iI edward White ladies sitting in there. So I went in, started wash, they didn't say anything to me. Whole of a sudden, black ladies, I sawing machine 'em peepin' ... " She starts to laugh. "And I infer they persuasion, 'Oh, she's in there', so they came over and started lavation their apparel, likewise. And when I got back to the house, my grandad was preaching, 'Yeah, my baby Mable!' - he never called me Mavis, he barely had one tooth. Soul had gone round and told him, 'Your grand-baby has gone and integrated the washeteria!'"I ask Staples why she thinks music played such a significant use in the civil rights social movement, and she tells me around departure back to George Washington DC to speak to congressman John Lewis, an companion of Rex world Health Organization has written the album's liner notes. "He said to me, 'Your padre, your family, you all kept us going, your music kept us release, the songs you sang kept us going.' And they did, we were penning our have exemption songs. March Up Freedom's Highway - we wrote that for the march from Selma to 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. And It's a Long Walk to DC, Merely I Got My Walking Place On - we wrote that for the march to Evergreen State."Music is goodness for the person," she continues. "It precisely kept you marching. And we would march altogether day, and and so we'd go to someone's house and get a big dinner, then we'd just altogether talk about what we'd done that day. It reminded me of the folks singers, when they'd call us to the ethnic music festivals, and there'd be Joan Baez, Bob Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Richie Havens. And after we sang the festivals, they'd take their acoustic guitars and go to 1 of these big houses and precisely sit on the floor and precisely everybody blab out unitedly. There's songs on the CD that relate to that time, like We Shall Non Be Moved - we'd go to a eating house and they wouldn't suffice us, and they'd call the constabulary to start out us outta there. And we'd lock arms and we'd blab out, 'We shall, we shall not be moved,' and everybody would scarce hold as tight as we could until the police force came and pulled us asunder. Music is just mightily."Does she feel that musicians feature a political province? "I have to talk only for us," she says, tentatively. "Simply I would love to try other singers sing it. I would love to get word a rapper blame freedom. We intellection about it too late - if I had asked Commons or Kanye to rap on just on one birdcall, perhaps." She sighs, her modality turned cloudy at the chance missed. "Because you require the edward Young people to try these songs. You desire them to cognise their inkiness history. I had a schoolteacher living next door to me, and she told me that when Rosa Parks passed away, a girl in her class, 17 eld old, asked her, 'What did she do? WHO was she?' And Genus Rosa Parks started it wholly!"I ask her what King was like, and she smiles heartily. "Oh Dr King, he was simply a serious-minded person," she says. "He wouldn't talk to us girls much, he would speak to my father. I loved to hear him laugh, but it was so seldom. You looked at him, and nearly of the time he either appeared worried or serious. Simply I remember his laughter."When Dr King was assassinated in Memphis in Apr 1968, the Staple Singers were in Capital of Tennessee to trifle a show. "I remember it so vividly," she says. "My father couldn't hold us, my sisters and I. We just went nutcase. Oh," she says, and her voice stumbles, "we but couldn't do by it. So papa told us, you totally get your apparel in concert, we're sledding menage. We couldn't sing. We cried wholly the way home. It was so sad, so sad." She pauses, catches herself most. "And Mrs. King, she ground a annotation in his sack of his last sermon that he was gonna do, and Ry Cooder had it. He wanted us to sing it. But we just now couldn't get it together this time. I think Ry still has in the back up of his idea that we're gonna do it. It's so right."I consume read, I say her, that she has some reservations around her colleague Chicagoan Barack Obama. "No," she says sweetly. "You know, I did at first, 'cause I heard Obama speak and I idea he was great. And then the next clip I saw him he was rather cocky. But that was when he low gear started. And now I'm completely for Obama." She smiles. "I like Hillary [Clinton], besides. If either unity of them wins, it's history - and it's altogether because of Dr Queen." Obama, she tells me, is a member of her church service in Boodle - "and yes, that was my subgenus Pastor doing entirely that bit." She refers, of course, to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons on race hold got Obama into worry in recent epoch weeks.She was scared at get-go, she says, posing in a LA hotel room, watching the coverage on CNN. "I said, oh Divine, he's gonna great deal it up for ma! Simply then I thought, that Reverend Wright, he's non a badly person. I was at the christian church earlier Obama, and I know him, and you know, he's not racialist. Only he gonna speak his intellect, he's from the old school, you know?" A shake of the headway, a raise of the custody. "But Obama!" she says his name fain. "Did you date what he did? It was amazing! When he did that [A More Perfective tense Pairing] speech I said, 'Lord thank you Good Shepherd!' This man, he's not Dr Martin Luther King, simply is in a direction so much like Dr King. I reckon if he was president, he would do right on by everybody, I really do. I think he would make a great president. And," she laughs, and looks a little brazen, "he's so handsome!".· We'll Ne'er Become Bet on is out now on Pinnacle. Throstle Staples plays the Barbacan, British capital EC2 (020-7638 8891), tonight, and then tours
