Mavis Staples – We Get By
Anti- – 24 May 2019
“I’m the messenger,” is how Mavis Staples described her purpose on the release of her new album We Get By and the eve of her 80th birthday next month. “That’s my job – it has been for my whole life – and I can’t just give up while the struggle’s still alive. We’ve got more work to do, so I’m going to keep on getting stronger and keep on delivering my message every single day.” Her knack of working with producers and songwriters who give room to her incredible voice and appreciate what motivates her continues with Ben Harper on writing and production duties. Moving, heartening and a timely call to action, We Get By is closer to the feel and sound of a Staple Singers record than any other solo album Mavis has made, and that makes it one to particularly relish.
Mavis Staples first sang in church with her family in 1948, aged just 8, and they first recorded as The Staple Singers in 1953. After Mavis’s father Pops Staples met Martin Luther King, they became key to the music of the Civil Rights Movement – Pops told the family: “If he can preach it, we can sing it”. The 1965 live album Freedom Highway was the pinnacle of that collaboration, with the title track written by Pops in the month after the bloody and deadly attacks by state troopers and white segregationists on civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama (Rhiannon Giddens chose wisely when she recorded the song, and it made the title track of her much-lauded 2017 album). The Staples performed at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival along with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and their versions of numerous Dylan songs sat comfortably alongside the gospel that was always at the core of their artistry.
At the iconic Stax label, the Staple Singers began in 1968 with a conscious expression of alignment between seemingly distinct genres with the title of their first album – ‘Soul Folk in Action’. Into the 1970s, at the forefront of contemporary soul music, came the supreme classics Respect Yourself, I’ll Take You There and If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me). Virtually every Staple Singers track had, for good reason, Mavis singing lead. She has made 11 previous solo albums, among them many gems including two produced by Prince – one just called, perfectly, The Voice, We’ll Never Turn Back, celebrating the Civil Rights era, produced by Ry Cooder and more recently three produced by Jeff Tweedy, the last, If All I Was Was Black (read our review here).
The rousing Change opens her latest album We Get By, a song title that in a word summarises the main message. ‘Can’t go on this way; Things gotta change around here; Say it loud say it clear’ Mavis sings with an urgent conviction, leaving you in no doubt that she is still, over 50 years after the Civil Rights era, singing about challenging the status quo. In this case, it is the devastating consequences of U.S. gun laws that are in focus: ‘Finger on the trigger around here; Bullets flying mothers crying’. The track starts with a simple walking blues guitar phrase, echoing the connection between marching and music that can be heard on Freedom Highway, although the overall sound is less the Chicago of Pops Staples, more an earthy, southern, swampland blues.
The title track, We Get By, happily takes us in a Staple Singers direction, with its unhurried pace, Pops-like gentle, rolling guitar and a gorgeous vocal shared between Mavis and Ben Harper. Harper sounds uncannily like Pops, just in a slightly higher register. It’s a song about resilience in the face of life’s challenges and being there for friends and family. It is one of several tracks in which you can’t fail but hear a connection with Mavis’s dedication of the album to her sister Yvonne who died last year. It is soul music in the truest sense, you know it comes from the heart, you can’t fail but feel enriched by it and you could listen to it all day.
The album is as much about the personal as it is about the political. There are three reflective songs which lie at the emotional heart of the album. They give us Mavis singing at a slower pace that is rare for her – a much earlier example, from 1970, was the incredible I Have Learned To Do Without You. The mournful Heavy On My Mind, is a powerful, intense, song about loss, with just a melancholy slow blues guitar accompaniment. Never Needed Anyone poignantly declaims the need for someone to lean on in the face of life’s cumulative scars:
Something so deep inside
It just won’t leave you alone
In a world that’s so lost and so dark and so afraid it cuts you to the bone
I never needed anyone like I need you
Mavis dwells in Harper’s sad song so wholly you could, for a couple of minutes, forget what a great force for hope she is. The similarly paced Hard To Leave, about regrets at not having as much time with people as you would like, lightens the mood, but not too much. With a less bluesy backing, it is founded on positively making the most of every opportunity:
Grab hold of the days
Before the days grab hold of you
Give it an extra minute
Maybe even a few
The state of the world is never far away, and Mavis identifies an echo of the Civil Rights period: “the news reminds me of the ’60s. We’re going at the world backwards. You know we’ve got to change. We need a change. And every chance I get I’m going to sing songs of change”. The object, in part, is evident, most explicitly on Brothers and Sisters: “Trouble in the land. We can’t trust that man.”
The album ends on a fitting upbeat note with One More Change To Make, which seems to sum up Mavis’s life at this point – acknowledging life’s troubles but expressing a profound optimism in the face of those troubles and declaring a continued determination to bring about change: “Some things take a lifetime; Some things can’t wait.” A remarkable combination of a life-affirming, affecting vocal on a made-for song and one of the tracks on which it’s easy to imagine Pops and Mavis’s siblings singing background.
Ben Harper has written an excellent set of uncomplicated, direct songs that perfectly capture what matters to Mavis Staples. In her own words:
“When I first started reading the lyrics Ben wrote for me; I said to myself, ‘My God, he’s saying everything that needs to be said right now,’. But the songs were also true to my journey and the stories I’ve been singing all my life. There’s a spirituality and an honesty to Ben’s writing that took me back to church.”
The arrangements, played by Mavis’s regular touring band, are also unfussy – sparse yet substantial – providing a very effective, relaxed bedrock for Mavis’s distinctive, compelling vocals.
Is this one you should listen to? The answer is easy: it’s by one of the greatest surviving singers from soul music’s golden era, the songs show she gives a damn and it’s one of her very best solo albums – oh, and Bob Dylan is one of her biggest fans. In the promo video of the title track, just as Mavis and Ben Harper finish their vocals, Mavis says “That’s a winner”. Apt as a description of the whole album, you don’t want to miss out on We Get By.
We Get By is out now – Order via Amazon
Photo Credit: Myriam Santos