“That’s right. That’s exactly right,” Mavis says, comparing Werner’s words to her family’s intentions. “You know, Pops would say that sometimes. He’d say, ‘We don’t have to die to go to heaven; heaven could be right here.’ But he said we got to work together. We got to work!” Soul folk in action.
The song titles themselves — “Long Walk To D.C.”, “Washington, We’re Watching You”, “We’ve Got To Get Together”, “Got To Be Some Changes Made”, “Give A Hand Take A Hand”, “Touch A Hand, Make A Friend”, “Give A Damn”, “We’ll Get Over”, “We The People”, and “Respect Yourself”, to cite only a few — tell the story. Or at least they seem to, until you hear Mavis Staples and her family sing them accompanied by the best rhythm sections ever to lay down a groove.
The Staples had a number of major hits while at Stax, but for message song potential, none of them touches “I’ll Take You There”, a pop and R&B chart-topper in 1972 that comes off Be:Altitude, the finest album of the group’s career.
Produced by Al Bell and recorded in Alabama with the same version of the Muscle Shoals rhythm section that played on Aretha Franklin’s best records, “I’ll Take You There” begins with a single hard thwack by drummer Roger Hawkins, who then lays down a skittering, irresistibly funky rhythm with the assistance of bassist David Hood, who, for his part, is busy copping the bass line from the British reggae hit “The Liquidator” by the Harry J Allstars.
When Mavis enters, she initially offers a gospel moan — “Oh-huh. Mmmh” — so brief and yet so subtly evocative that it sounds as if she might somehow be giving birth, reaching climax, toting a heavy bale, and experiencing her final death rattle all at the same time. She knows a place, she tells us, where there are no tears or worries. A place where, she assures us, there are no smiling but lying faces of the sort warned about in soul group Undisputed Truth’s hit from the previous summer (“Smiling Faces Sometimes”). She can take us to this place, but only if we join her and offer assistance as needed. “He’p me,” she pleads. “Come on, somebody he’p me now. He’p me, y’all…Let me take you there!”
She’s not too proud to beg for help either. “Play it, Barry,” she tells keyboardist Barry Beckett. “Play your pia-nuh now.” Then she turns to her father’s guitar for help (though this guitar is actually played here by studio ace Jimmy Johnson): “Big Daddy now!”
“Davey, Little Davey,” she pleads next, imploring the Muscle Shoals bassist to help her take him there. And then she helps him, singing the bass line with Hood in a voice more impossibly deep than ever. “Mercy, mercy…,” she shouts near the end of the record. “You…gotta let me take you over there!”
It is hard to imagine a record more filled with the gospel impulse than “I’ll Take You There”. Its genius lies in its willingness to take the gospel impulse beyond the provincial interests of the collection plate or next week’s Sunday school attendance, and even beyond the partisan winning and losing of individual souls to Christ, to a place — religious and secular at once — where it can face up to great human suffering and still know an optimism that tomorrow needn’t be so cloudy.
The church, Mavis says today, hated it. In the ’60s, when real progress seemed possible almost every day, the gospel community that gave birth to the Staple Singers embraced the group’s extra-religious adventures as relevant and necessary. But after King’s assassination and the rise of a less focused (or at least less obviously successful) black militancy, after Nixon’s southern strategy and silent majority, the times had changed and the church audience grew less generous. It was like her grandmother was sending her out again for switches, mad because she was singing the blues.
“It was our transition to the contemporary gospel,” Mavis confirms, “that got us in trouble with the church. ‘I’ll Take You There’ came out and suddenly the Staple Singers were singing the Devil’s music. I’d tell people, the Devil don’t have no music. All music is God’s music.
“I mean, I’m telling you I know a place. Nobody crying, nobody worried. Ain’t no smiling faces lying to the races. Now where could I be taking you but to heaven? But church people were upset because we had a rhythm section, instead of just my father’s guitar.”
The Staple Singers continued to score hits for a time, including a flat-out love song in 1975 called “Let’s Do It Again” (that and “I’ll Take You There” both reached #1 on the pop charts). They made a famous guest appearance with The Band in The Last Waltz, they performed at Jimmy Carter’s inaugural, and in 1979, Pops and Mavis cut another version of “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”, this time with George Jones and their old producer Billy Sherrill.
