Tribune music critic Greg Kot‘s new book, “I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers and the March Up Freedom’s Highway” (Scribner) is out Tuesday. It traces the rise of Chicago’s first family of gospel, soul and protest music from its 19th-century roots in Mississippi through its critical role in the civil rights movement alongside Martin Luther King. Beyond million-selling hits “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself” in the ’70s, deep collaborations with Bob Dylan, the Band, Bonnie Raitt, Jeff Tweedy and Prince, and Mavis Staples’ resurgence as a solo artist in the last decade, Kot digs into the family’s early years on the city’s South Side. The following excerpt explains how Roebuck “Pops” Staples and his children — Pervis, Cleotha (“Cleedi”), Yvonne and Mavis — forged their groundbreaking sound:
Mavis Staples’ voice teacher at Parker High School in Chicago didn’t get her.
“My voice was heavy, I used to fight in grammar school down south because my voice was so low and kids would tease me about it,” she says. “But I was a tomboy who loved to fight. They used to tell me, ‘You sound like a boy.’ ‘Okay, I’ll show you how a boy fights.’ My mother’s voice was strong, and my grandmother’s, too. Only difference was, my mother couldn’t sing. Whenever she started to sing around the house, we’d beg her to stop [laughs]. In my a cappella choir in high school, I tried to sing with the girls but I couldn’t. ‘Mavis, Mavis, you’re singing in the basement again,’ my teacher, Mr. Finch, would say. ‘You’re singing with the boys.’ I was so embarrassed. I quit the choir because I couldn’t sing like Mr. Finch wanted.”
Fast-forward a few decades, and Mr. Finch would likely still be exasperated by his former student’s lack of training. “One time I was supposed to sing the national anthem for the Lakers” before an NBA game, Mavis says. “The organist asked me what key I would like to sing it in, and I said, ‘Good question’ [laughs]. I had to call Pops. Pops got his guitar and said, ‘Show me the highest point of your vocals.’ I was singing where I was comfortable, and he said, ‘Go back and tell the organist you’re singing in A.’ I had no idea.”
From the start, the Staple Singers weren’t easy to peg. They were a charming, handsome family, easy to look at, easy to root for. The gospel music circuit could be unforgiving, though, and there were traditions to be observed, rules that needed to be followed, lines that couldn’t be crossed without consequences. The Staple Singers evoked a tradition — several traditions, really — in a most untraditional way.
“That old man should just take them kids home — those kids ought to be in school,” some put-out worshipers would mutter when the Staples first started appearing at South Side churches.
“The regular gospel singers laughed at us,” Pops told Goldmine in 1996. “They’d sing loud and then we’d get up there with our little, soft singing.”
Who were these amateurs? The ages of the singers — two teenagers and a conspicuous preteen flanked by a dapper, guitar-playing gentleman with a caramel complexion and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair — didn’t quite match up with the sound. One might’ve expected something adolescent and exuberant. Instead, the Staples delivered music amid the concrete and steel of Chicago that was solemn, Southern, and rural — “hillbilly,” as gospel singer Donald Gay described it. To worshipers who still had the South in their DNA and their accents, this music was deeply nostalgic. Just one of Mavis’s long moans, Cleotha’s swoops into a minor key, or a trembling chord on Pops’s guitar could instantly evoke the world they’d left behind.
“The Staple Singers had a different sound from any other group at the time,” Leroy Crume says. “Pop is from down home, and he sounded like it. When Pop came on the scene, he brought this little gadget you put on an amplifier — at the time they weren’t making amps with tremolos. Pop was the first one to have that little contraption on his guitar. People used to call it ‘Pop Staples and his nervous guitar.’ That set him apart from everybody.”
More Top Picks Best Wine Label Scanner Apps
The Staples’ vocal style also struck Crume as odd, if in a pleasing way. “They weren’t superpolished. That country-type singing just came naturally out of them. It was a heck of an identity for them, but they didn’t know any better. Mavis had that big voice coming out of that little body — that just blew people away. A girl bass singer! She was different. The entire group was different, the way they harmonized, it wasn’t ‘correct.’ Other groups had instructors. Somebody from a name group would come in and help out the younger guys, like my older brother
“A.C. was instructing the Crume Brothers, and one of the guys from the Flamingos started to teach us how to read music. He had us sounding like the Mills Brothers. The Staples really didn’t sound like anyone else you knew.”
When R&B; singer Jerry Butler was still a kid in the years before he joined the Impressions with his friend Curtis Mayfield, he remembers hearing an early recording by the Staple Singers and being struck by “the girl with the low voice — at first, I thought it was a man.”
“Someone said, ‘No, that’s a girl, and she’s about twelve, thirteen.’ I couldn’t believe it. As I listened more, I realized how beautiful, organic, and unique it all felt, the way the vibrato of Mavis’ voice matched the vibrato of Pops’ guitar amplifier.”
Mavis generously deflects some of the attention heaped on her whenever the Staples sound is parsed for originality. “I credit Pops’ guitar and Cleedi’s voice as making our sound. She hit those high harmonies, and Pops would take her to a minor key a lot. When we first sang ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken,’ Cleedi had a way of turning that song in a way that would just ring in your ear — it wasn’t harsh or hitting you too hard; it was soothing. Cleedi gave us that country sound.”
Jon Shields, an ardent gospel fan who was two years younger than Mavis when both attended Francis Parker, calls the family vocal blend “a fine whine.”
“What was unique to them — and it’s true about many family groups like the Barrett Sisters, the Pointer Sisters — there is a blend that only their family has,” Shields says. “Cleo is the one who really had that distinct sound. When they would bend a note to end a song, it goes into a whine. If you listen to the Staples’ voices individually, you can hear that whine in each, they pitch down at the end of a line. That’s very country, very Southern, very much their trademark.”
Crume hears it, too, and suggests that such trademarks owed everything to their insularity. “It was probably good they didn’t have any formal instruction,” Crume says. “When you learn music you can get mighty picky trying to sing it ‘correctly.’ When I came to the Soul Stirrers, Sam [Cooke] had three different keys he’d like to sing in, depending on whether he was rehearsing, singing for the radio, or singing in concert. He knew what effect it would have on an audience; he knew his voice hadn’t woken up in the morning, so he’d have a lower, ‘broadcast’ key. To save his voice during rehearsal, he’d sing in a middle key. And then he’d have his program key, where he’d sing in his highest voice to be heard over the screaming in the audiences at auditoriums and gyms. With Mavis and them, they didn’t know what key they sang in. Pops played in but one key, E, and that’s all they needed.”
Gospel critic Anthony Heilbut says that lack of formality made the group more accessible to people. “Their voices are all in a very singable range,” he says. “With other gospel acts, it was very hard for the congregation to identify with the singing range, it just seemed beyond them. But the Staples very much felt like one of them, and that made them very appealing. In that way they were like a folk act from the very beginning.”
Just how innovative were the Staple Singers? Pops would often repeat the story that he was gospel-guitar pioneer. “We were the first gospel group to be allowed to bring a guitar into church,” he claimed in his unpublished memoir. Indeed, there is some evidence that ministers in the Methodist churches didn’t look kindly upon guitar playing at their services, though guitars and tambourines were commonplace in Baptist, Pentecostal, and more sanctified church settings.
Crume agrees with Pops to an extent: “The Crume Brothers and the Staples were the only groups in Chicago with a guitar-based gospel sound. There were no other local groups with the guitar when we came on the scene. I was the first guitar player on the radio with a gospel group, and Roebuck was next.”
But the guitar already had a long tradition in gospel music. Sister Rosetta Tharpe rocked a guitar on gospel-swing hits in the 1930s and ’40s, prompting even a young Mavis Staples to request a few guitar lessons from Pops. The bluesy guitar evangelism of Blind Willie Johnson — Pops’s old Mississippi favorite — inspired modern proponents besides the Staple Singers, most significantly the Florida-based Consolers. Singer Iola Pugh and her guitar-playing husband, Sullivan Pugh, favored a “down-home” approach that was even rougher and cruder than the Staples sound. Sullivan’s guitar — which he positioned sideways to his stomach, almost like a lap steel — rang out with country-blues reverb that Staples fans surely would recognize.
Some of the gospel greats could be condescending about the Staples sound. R. H. Harris, formerly of the Soul Stirrers, once commented to Heilbut: “That relaxing style, I hates it.”
“But the black gospel audience did understand the Staples had a special sound, and Pops was very good at coming up with hooks,” Heilbut says.
“Pops’ guitar was not busy or active or fancy or in front — it’s an environmental sound,” says Ry Cooder, a master guitarist and student of the early Staple Singers albums and later a collaborator with both Pops and Mavis. “What Pops was giving was a tone behind the voices. They didn’t have bass, drums, all those silly things they didn’t need and shouldn’t have. What he did have was these spooky chords that made it sound like you’re in a cave, or you’re in some dark place, and then out of that darkness would come these wailing four-part harmonies. I assume that came from the black shape-note churches, which don’t exist anymore down south. Pops adapted that sound from his youth for his family. It was the four voices — the three kids and him — and he combined that old, country, black-church harmony with this spooky guitar. It must’ve been incredible for all these transplanted people who made their way up north to Detroit or Chicago or Gary to hear this, because they’re all homesick. They’ve all left their hamlets and towns in this tremendous upheaval of northern migration, and here come the Staple Singers singing just like they remembered.”
The census bureau reported that between 1940 and 1960, the black population in Chicago nearly tripled to 813,000 from 278,000, most from the South. Blacks accounted for nearly one-quarter of the city’s population in 1960, up from barely 8 percent two decades earlier. The city was in many ways as segregated as the South, however, with blacks largely confined to increasingly congested housing on the South Side and facing blatant hiring discrimination in the retail and construction industries. City jobs for black police, firefighters, and bus drivers were largely limited to black neighborhoods, with little opportunity for advancement into management positions.
For this marginalized community, the black church provided sanctuary, solace, and a place to vent. Just as the slaves and then the sharecroppers found respite in church songs after long days in the fields, the black migrants — factory workers, stockyard laborers, nannies, maids — in the northern cities went to church to lift their voices and spirits.
Singers and preachers were the leaders and celebrities of this community; gospel programs often blended songs and sermon in a synergy of salvation. The word of the most revered performers and ministers carried enormous weight. Mahalia Jackson, the reigning queen of gospel, refused to sing the blues, even though she had borrowed certain vocal mannerisms from blues singers. “I sing God’s music because it makes me feel free,” she said. “It gives me hope. With the blues, when you finish, you still have the blues.”
That was the hard line the Staples were up against, and Pops preached a similar stance to his kids. But his music was far less rigid; the Staples essentially made up their own rules, established their own vocabulary, one that borrowed from several genres without really embodying any of them. There were the four-part harmonies that Pops sang with his family on their Dockery Farms porch in Mississippi; the blues he heard and played at the Saturday night house parties on the plantations; the handclapping and foot stomping that Mavis and Yvonne witnessed at Grandma Ware’s little wooden church on the hill in Mound Bayou, Miss.; the doo-woppers and street serenaders that Pervis emulated during the Sunday battle of the bands on the South Side.
Duke Ellington understood what Mavis’s high school voice teacher did not. What seemed like “mistakes” to certain purists were turned into strengths by the Staples. “You play gospel in a blues key,” Ellington told Pops. It was as apt a description as any for what came next.
Greg Kot will discuss “I’ll Take You There” at book signings on Jan. 24 at Anderson’s in Naperville, Jan. 27 at Boswell Books in Milwaukee, Jan. 31 at Book Stall in Winnetka, Feb. 3 at the St. Louis County Library in St. Louis, and Feb. 7 at City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie Blvd.