NEW YORK
"Have a Little Faith" is the title of Mavis Staples' new album and it's inspirational.
That will not surprise anyone who has been listening to Staples' majestic contralto for the past half-century, from her teenage roots as lead vocalist for the Staple Singers, one of the most successful gospel groups of all time and vibrant voices of the civil rights movement, to a series of solo albums that seldom received the attention they deserved, to spectacular guest spots on current albums by Dr. John and Los Lobos and tribute albums to Johnny Paycheck, Stephen Foster and Bob Dylan, who, as it happens, once asked Mavis Staples to marry him.
Mavis Staples and family in the 1973 documentary "Wattstax," above. Mavis (far left) with father Roebuck "Pops" and sisters Cleotha and Yvonne at RFK Stadium in 1976.
(Stax/fantasy Inc.)
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Staples, who performs at the Birchmere on Friday, is also appearing on screens big and small, in new versions of the historic '70s music documentaries "Wattstax" and "Soul to Soul" and in the Martin Scorsese-produced "Lightning in a Bottle," a concert film recorded at 2003's Year of the Blues extravaganza at Radio City Music Hall. She performed "America the Beautiful" at the Democratic National Convention before John Kerry's acceptance speech.
Resting up in her hotel suite during an off-day between Apollo Theater concerts with another pretty good singer, the Rev. Al Green, the 65-year-old legend says she's just staying the course.
"I'm doing the same thing on this CD that the Staple Singers have been doing all along," she explains. "I couldn't get away from that: That's what I sing, that's what we've been about all these years. Pops" -- family patriarch Roebuck Staples -- "would tell songwriters, 'If you want to write for the Staple Singers, read the headlines.' We sing about what's happening in the world today, and whatever's wrong we try to fix it through a song. We're living in dark times, troubled times; we wanted to spread a ray of light on the world."
In many ways, "Have a Little Faith" is not just a Mavis Staples album, it's also a Pops Staples album. His gospel-blues guitar work underscores "I Wanna Thank You" and "There's a Devil on the Loose," recorded in 1997 before his health took a turn for the worse (he died in 2000, just before his 86th birthday). The album also features Mavis revisiting two Staple Singers staples, "A Dying Man's Plea" and "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," songs Pops once sang lead on.
The latter happens to be the very first song he taught his children in the late '40s as they gathered around him on the floor of the family's living room in Chicago. Just last month -- almost six decades after her first encounter with "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" -- Staples found herself in Nashville at the Americana Honors & Awards, singing the Carter Family classic to Janette Carter, the 81-year-old daughter of A.P. and Sara Carter and niece of Maybelle Carter.
The Carter Family, the Staple Singers -- family tradition and American music don't get much better than that.
An unbreakable family circle is particularly evident on "Pops Recipe," a wonderfully insistent biographical homage and distillation of life lessons Pops instilled in his progeny: "Accept responsibility . . . don't forget humility . . . serve your artistry . . . don't subscribe to bigotry, hypocrisy, duplicity . . . respect humanity."
"That was his recipe for raising us," Staples explains warmly. Actually, she recollects everything warmly, in a rich Mississippi accent absorbed from her mother and never diminished despite decades of Chicago living.
"Pops also showed us how his father made a parable of the family unit if you stick together," Staples adds. "There were 14 of them, so he took 14 pencils, put them together and tried to break them -- said he couldn't break them. Then he took one pencil and snapped it in two and said, 'This is what happens to you when you try to go out away from your family. If you stay together, you'll be strong. Nobody can break you, nobody can tear you apart.' "
In the Beginning
The Staple Singers sound had its roots in Pops Staples' coming of age on the infamous Dockery's Farm cotton plantation in Drew, Miss.
"He gave us the voices that he and his sisters and brothers used to sing," Staples explains. "Pops would tell me that after dinner they'd go out on the gallery [porch] and sing, and after a while you'd see people coming all across the fields to their back yard; when they'd finish, it would be full of people. I said, 'Pops, you all should have raised an offering!' "
