Bill Friskics-Warren wrote about Mavis Staples in April 2007 for The Washington Post:

At this point, recording an album of freedom songs might strike some as an exercise in nostalgia, but for Mavis Staples, one of the most stirring gospel and soul singers of all time, it couldn't be timelier -- or more prophetic. Outraged by what she saw in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Staples reinvests the likes of "We Shall Not Be Moved" and "(Ain't Nobody Gonna) Turn Me Around" with the moral authority to speak to social and economic injustices that persist today.

"Down in Mississippi / brothers in jail, uneducated children / It's the 21st century, it feels like it's 1960," she ad-libs in a searing remake of Dorothy Love Coates's "Ninety-Nine and a Half." Later, in "My Own Eyes," testifying to how as a little girl she and her father and siblings were jailed by Jim Crow police, she cries, "It's been almost 50 years / How much longer will it last? / We need a change now more than ever / Why are we still treated so bad?"

Staples enlists a cloud of kindred witnesses to join her in her call-and-response, notably Ladysmith Black Mambazo and members of the original Freedom Singers, all of whom have known oppression firsthand. Ry Cooder's gutbucket production lends the music further ballast. Often consisting of no more than Cooder's slide guitar and his son Joachim's ambient percussion or drum loops, the arrangements sound like 21st-century updates of the soul-folk that the Staple Singers patented back in the 1960s. Rarely have "remakes" sounded so tonic or inspired.