Staples, Mavis

▪ 2006

      After more than 50 years of performing and still in top form, in 2005 American soul, blues, and gospel singer Mavis Staples accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy on behalf of her family's vocal group, the Staple Singers, in February and received three W.C. Handy Awards in May. Her chart-topping blues album Have a Little Faith (2004) won the Handy Awards for best blues album and best soul blues album, and she received the award for best female soul blues artist. They were her first awards as a solo performer. The smoky-voiced Staples was also nominated for a Grammy Award for best gospel performance for her duet with Dr. John “Lay My Burden Down” (2004). The honours marked the culmination of Staples's return to performing and recording following the death in December 2000 of her father, Roebuck (“Pops”) Staples, who founded the Staple Singers. Mavis Staples recorded Have a Little Faith as a tribute to her father, whose influence—musical, parental, and spiritual—was everywhere evident on the album. Included on it was Staples's rendition of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a favourite of her father's, as well as “Pops Recipe,” which incorporated in its lyrics biographical details from the elder Staples's life and cherished examples of his fatherly advice.

      Staples was born on July 10, 1939, in Chicago. At age 11 she joined the family gospel-singing group led by her father. As a high-school graduate in 1957, she had aspirations of becoming a nurse, but her father persuaded her to stay with the group, which recorded several gospel hits by the early 1960s. The Staple Singers' transition to soul and rhythm and blues began in the late 1960s, when they signed with Stax Records, the same label on which Staples recorded her solo debut, Mavis Staples, in 1969. Her second solo effort, Only for the Lonely (1970), included the hit “I Have Learned to Do Without You,” but it was the Staple Singers' string of Top 40 hits in the 1970s that made Staples and her family true pop stars. Her solo albums of the late 1970s and '80s did not fare well as she experimented unsuccessfully with disco and electro-pop. Time Waits for No One (1989) and The Voice (1993), despite critics' praise, also failed to prosper, and Staples's struggle to find a suitable outlet for her music continued. In 1996 she recorded Spirituals and Gospel: Dedicated to Mahalia Jackson in honour of Jackson, a close friend and role model. Staples curtailed her musical activity as her father's health declined in the late 1990s. Her first recordings after his death were collaborations with other artists, including Bob Dylan and Los Lobos. Her duet with Dylan, “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” (2003), was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Janet Moredock

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