“We actually courted back in the ’60s,” she admits. “Bobby was a cutie and I guess I was maybe a cutie too. Off and on for several years, I guess, we’d write letters to each other and smooch.”
“Pops used to say, ‘I don’t know where this boy comes from, don’t know where he gets these great songs.’ One time he told him, ‘Bob, I think this is God’s gift to you. His gift is that these words come into your head.'”
Mavis and the Staples continued to inch their way to stardom throughout the 1960s. They maintained their presence on the gospel circuit, filling churches and school auditoriums with the sanctified likes of Marian Williams, the Ward Singers, and the Caravans. At the same time, they increasingly shared their mix of folk and gospel with pop audiences, sharing stages with everyone from Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin to Moby Grape and Ten Years After.
The Staples’ attempt to reach beyond the gospel market was typical of the times. It was an ambition that reflected, of course, the bigger paydays available to crossover artists, but it also revealed a desire among many artists to take a stand in support of civil rights. Indeed, by the time Pops moved the family to Epic Records in 1965, he and his children were ready to sing not just of a heaven above but of what could be done right here, right now, to assist the movement that centered around Martin Luther King Jr., to do what they could to lighten the burdens of this world.
“We were in Montgomery, Alabama,” Mavis remembers, “and King was preaching that night at his church. ‘I like this man Martin,’ Daddy said. ‘I like his message and I want to go to his 11 o’clock service. Do you all want to go?'”
They did, and the result was a new focus for the group. During the service, King acknowledged the group’s presence, and afterward King met Mavis and her siblings, before speaking alone with Roebuck for several minutes. Back at the hotel, Pops famously told his children: “If he can preach it, we can sing it.”
Over the next few years, working primarily with a young Nashville producer named Billy Sherrill, the Staples continued to record gospel songs, including a rousing new version of “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” in 1966. More and more, though, they recorded the songs Pops had been writing about specific racial dramas unfolding across the south, and as was appropriate to the broader political ambitions of these songs, Sherrill surrounded Mavis’ vocals for the first time with rhythmic, full-band arrangements.
“‘Freedom’s Highway’, he wrote that one for the march from Selma to Montgomery,” Mavis explains. “‘Why? (Am I Treated So Bad)’ he wrote ’cause of the Little Rock Nine. I remember Pops was in his recliner at home, and I was sitting on the floor watching the news, and just as those kids got to the door of the bus a policeman put his Billy club across the door. ‘Why they doin’ that?’ Pops said. ‘Why they treating them so bad?’
The song turned out to be Dr. King’s favorite: “He’d always say to Daddy, ‘You gonna sing my song tonight?’ He loved that one.”
The Staples, Mavis says, appeared with King on at least four occasions. After the last of these, during King’s expansion of the movement north to the Staples’ home base in Chicago, he asked them if they would play a month’s worth of Saturdays at the offices of Operation Breadbasket. Later renamed Operation Push, the office was headed by a largely unknown upstart named Jesse Jackson. “King asked us to play there because he thought if we did, folks would come out and they’d get to know Jesse,” Mavis says.
The Staple Singers’ Epic tenure produced some of their finest music but was frustratingly brief. Sherrill turned his attention elsewhere once he began scoring hits with country star David Houston, and though the last records the Staples made for the label included the first records of their career to crack the pop charts (a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What’s It Worth” crept to #66), the label dropped them for poor sales in 1967.
The Message that Rock Music Is Still Looking For…
It picks up where the Bible leaves off.
— advertisement for the Staple Singers’ 1972 album Be:Altitude
At Memphis’ Stax Records, where the Staple Singers next signed, they proceeded to cut a series of what they termed message songs. From their very first album for the label, 1968’s Soul Folk In Action, to their last, 1974’s City In The Sky, the group set out to share with a far larger audience the very lesson they’d been preaching for almost a decade: A better world is waiting, but it takes something more powerful than just you or me to get there.
As critic Craig Werner puts it in A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, And The Soul Of America, this lesson is what can be called the gospel impulse. In the civil rights struggle, the greater force had been a movement of people who accomplished together what individuals working alone could never have done. “For the classic gospel singers,” Werner writes, “the source is god; for soul singers, it’s love…Whatever its specific incarnation, gospel redemption breaks down the difference between personal salvation and communal liberation. No one makes it alone…[I]f we are going to…move on up, we’ve got to connect. The music shows us how.”
