By mid-century, Osceola Staples was working as a laundry supervisor at Chicago’s Morrison Hotel and Roebuck worked construction with the Crane Company. Pops was also trying to make it in the world of gospel music, singing with a group called the Trumpet Jubilees.
“They had six members but only two or three of them ever showed up for practice,” Mavis recalls, a situation that frustrated her ambitious and disciplined father. One night in 1950, disgusted by yet another poor turnout at rehearsal, Pops came home, retrieved his guitar from the closet — “He got it at a pawn shop; I think he paid $7” — and called his family into the living room. “I’m going to sing with my children,” he said.
With Pervis, Cleotha, Mavis and Yvonne gathered in a circle around him on the floor, Pops set to teaching them the harmony parts for “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”. The song is popularly associated, of course, with country music. But Pop knew “Circle” not from the Carter Family’s famous recordings, but because it is also included in traditional black gospel songbooks such as the Gospel Pearl. Roebuck sang the song as a child at church and out on the gallery with his family in Mississippi.
“We went down to Aunt Katie’s church, my father’s sister, and we sang ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’, and they clapped us back three times,” she says. “We had to sing ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’ three times, too, ’cause that’s the only song Pops had taught us all the way through.” Mavis was just 10 years old — during the Staple Singers’ first public performance, she had to stand on a chair to be seen by the congregation — but her voice was already big and unaccountably deep. “I sang bass, even then,” she reveals. “You know, a ladies’ bass.”
The first Vee-Jay record we made was “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again,” and as it sold only 1,000 I thought Vee-Jay was disappointed with us, so we were ready to quit. But Vee-Jay said “No, no, when will you be ready to go into the studio?” And I said, “I’m ready to go in now.” So we went in and made “Uncloudy Day,” and it sold like rock ‘n’ roll.
— Roebuck “Pops” Staples, from Viv Broughton’s Black Gospel: An Illustrated History Of The Gospel Sound
“Uncloudy Day” is a Roebuck Staples original that speaks of a better tomorrow even while sounding so mournful you fear its singers may not make it through to the end of the song. The record, released in 1956, was such a success partly because the Staples’ emphasis on harmony made them stand out in a gospel scene that tended to spotlight lead singers — either screamers, such as Ira Tucker of the Dixie Hummingbirds, or sweet falsettos, such as Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones. But the gospel community also embraced “Uncloudy Day” because it was familiar. The record’s focus on harmony reminded transplanted southerners of home.
Not that the Staples’ lead singer ever has been unimportant to the group’s sound. “Uncloudy Day” begins with Pops striking a tremolo chord on his pawn shop guitar; what follow are a verse and a chorus of Mississippi harmony. When Mavis finally enters, alone, she heralds her own arrival on the national gospel scene with a slow, dramatic “Well, well, well” that sounds a good deal deeper than a ladies’ bass.
“When we’d come to sing in those days,” Mavis remembers, “some people would actually be placing bets among themselves: ‘That can’t be a girl singing that part!’ We’d start all in harmony, you know, then Pervis would step up like he was going to sing my part. People’d elbow each other then and say, ‘See, I told you that wasn’t no little girl.’ Then I’d sneak in behind and go, real low, ‘Well, well, well, oh…’ And the whole place would go wild!
“One time a fellow complained to Daddy that he’d lost his whole paycheck betting that wasn’t no girl singing. Daddy told him, ‘Well, you shouldn’t bet!'”
An honest-to-God hit, “Uncloudy Day” allowed Pops to quit his job and the Staples to begin playing well outside of Chicago. Over the next few years, the group followed its breakthrough hit with several more memorable and commercially successful Vee-Jay sides; highlights included “This May Be The Last Time” (a Pops composition later adopted by the Stones) and, in 1960, the group’s first recorded version of “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”. Still, because Roebuck was, in his daughter’s words, “always aggressive, always one step ahead,” the Staples’ patriarch moved his family to the Riverside label in 1960.
Riverside was a larger company with a focus on jazz. The first result of the Staples’ move — increased exposure — was almost instantaneous. For example, in 1961, the Staple Singers sang “Help Me, Jesus” at JFK’s inaugural, and the next year they were chosen by Downbeat magazine as Best New Vocal Group.
The second consequence of the Staples’ move to Riverside was a more diverse repertoire. Riverside encouraged Pops to supplement the group’s gospel material with songs that might appeal to the white college crowd, thus hitching a ride on the folk revival; at the same time, this was music that, as Pops liked to say, “still touched and uplifted people and started them on their way.” At Riverside, the Staple Singers cut folk standards such as “Old Cotton Fields Back Home”, “Dying Man’s Plea”, and “This Land Is Your Land”, as well as new songs such as Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind”, “Masters Of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”.
Dylan, in fact, became particularly close to Mavis and her family. “The first time we met him he knew our songs already, knew the words already to our songs, and he knew all of our names,” she recalls. “We’d run into him a lot…Pervis and Bob got to be really tight buddies. Everybody’d be sleeping, but they’d be sitting out on the stoop talking.”
