Mavis Staples – We’ll Never Turn Back

Although Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin both achieved higher artistic renown, no one has united the worlds of spiritual and secular music as seamlessly as Mavis Staples. Where Aretha and Sam Cooke were seen as switching from the former to the latter (without totally abandoning gospel), it has never been an either/or proposition for Staples. Even during the period of her greatest crossover success, Mavis never really crossed over. When the Staple Singers enjoyed early ’70s smashes such as “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself”, she invested those performances with the gospel fervor that comes as naturally to her as breathing.

Here, her challenge is to breathe fresh life into spiritual music so strongly associated with civil rights activism that it might strike some as an exercise in ’60s nostalgia, protest revivalism. As familiar as material such as “Keep Your Eyes On The Prize”, “We Shall Not Be Moved”, “This Little Light” and “Jesus On The Mainline” might be, the personal testimony and conviction — the sheer immediacy — that Staples brings to the sessions carries no whiff of anachronism. And the issues the music addresses plainly haven’t been resolved. While memories of Mississippi pervade the performance, Katrina is never far from mind.

The Chicago-born Staples came of age during a period of profound transition for both the black church and its music. Formerly an institution of cultural conservatism — one that preached hope for freedom and equality and justice somewhere down the line, in a better world than this — the church saw an activist wing replace the complacency of “someday” with the urgency of “now.” Traditional spirituals became “freedom songs,” and it was those songs that first brought the Staples’ family musical group and their breathy young singer to prominence.

As a solo artist, the passion and power of Staples’ vocals have made her a pet project of producers ranging from Curtis Mayfield to Prince, from Jerry Wexler to Joe Henry, but her voice will always be most associated with the swampy tremolo guitar of her father, Staple Singers patriarch Roebuck “Pops” Staples. His tonal influence, which subsequently snaked through the classics of Creedence Clearwater Revival and more recently pervaded Marty Stuart’s transcendent Souls’ Chapel, is a signature sound embedded deep within the DNA of Mavis Staples and the music of the American south.

What’s particularly striking, then, about this collaboration with producer-guitarist Ry Cooder is how he approaches the musical songbook fresh, resisting any temptation to frame Mavis’ vocals with an emulation of her father’s sweeter sound. Such a strong stylist in his own right, Cooder opts for a harsher, slashing slide guitar than Pops Staples’ more laid-back strains on “Keep Your Eyes On The Prize”; Cooder’s guitar emerges as practically another voice within the intricacy of the arrangement’s call-and-response.

Many of the other arrangements emphasize the African side of the African-American hyphenate, as guitars and percussion combine in a manner that is both spare and complex, irresistibly propulsive. This would be a galvanizing collection of powerhouse grooves even if the vocals were erased.

Yet the vocal arrangements are every bit as inspired as the musicianship that brings out the extemporaneous best in Mavis. She uses the grooves as the bedrock for the call-and-response that has long been integral within the musical tradition that spawned the Staple Singers. Even here, the album provides a fresh twist, opening with three cuts that pair Staples with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose experience with apartheid in South Africa gives the themes of racism a universal resonance. Their vocal harmonies function like the gospel equivalent of a Greek chorus, in performances that seem to have an epic heft (sounding like they could have gone on forever and were likely edited from longer takes).

Even with the album-opening “Down In Mississippi”, written by bluesman J.B. Lenoir, Staples employs the lyric as a peg for personal testimony. No, she wasn’t born in Mississippi, as the song suggests, but her spoken-word evocation of her experiences visiting her Mississippi grandparents sound as raw as yesterday. Just listen to the bitterness in her laugh. And the primal groove is pure Mississippi muscle memory.

Pretty much every one of these performances amounts to a radical transformation. After the opening three cuts, Ladysmith Black Mambazo gives way to the Freedom Singers as Staples’ call-and-response foil, with the opening vocal of Charles Neblett providing a clarion call for “In The Mississippi River”. Though the song has a nursery rhyme’s cadence, the undercurrent is far more sinister, in its lyric of activist corpses submerged in the river.

From there, “I’m On My Way” has an almost ghostly shimmer above its talking drums, while the uptempo groove given “This Little Light” is funkier soul than the familiar folk sing-along. Cooder’s propulsive arrangement and lyrics to “99 12”, a freedom song that also inspired a hit by Wilson Pickett, turn it into an anthem that represents the album’s thematic essence: No matter how much progress has been made, the mission is far from over.

Then comes the record’s centerpiece and highlight, “In My Own Eyes”, a reflectively autobiographical number that initially comes closest to the sweeter lilt of the Staple Singers yet picks up a head of spiritual steam that turns the material into a manifesto. In the wake of that emotional crescendo, the numbers that follow strike notes of reverent resolve. “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around” reverts to its roots as an acoustic spiritual, Staples reinforces the “never” of the title track by stretching it into four or five syllables, and “I’ll Be Rested” offers a litany of the martyred and departed before the album closes with “Jesus Is On The Mainline”.

Though We’ll Never Turn Back will inevitably be classified as a “political” album, it has long been my contention that all music is equally political, whether it challenges the status quo or reinforces it. The problem with message music is that once you get the message, you no longer need the music. In purely musical effect, the power, passion and conviction that permeate this project cannot be denied. Nor resisted.