“Makin’ ’em feel good”: The exact moment Mavis Staples knew she would be a singer
On November 7th, Mavis Staples will drop her 14th studio album, Sad And Beautiful World.
For any other artist, titling an album with a line like that would be an act of absurd self-importance. What the hell could anyone know about a subject as vast as “the world” that they could claim to be an expert on it?! Yet, coming from the R&B legend, it’s perfectly apt. This is someone who, after all, is hurtling into their 75th decade as a working musician. You read that right. Not 75th year on this planet, 75th year as a working musician.
Stands to reason that the incomparable Ms Staples has learned a thing or two in her incredible life. From her early days in gospel legends the Staples Sisters to a solo career that has seen her collaborate with everyone from Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin to Arcade Fire and Pusha T, her wide taste in collaborators extends to the people she’ll share space with on Sad and Beautiful World too, with Buddy Guy, Bonnie Raitt, Justin Vernon and even MJ Lenderman turning up to make some righteous noise.
I’m not mentioning those collaborators for the sake of name-dropping either. Each of them is someone who hears Staples’ still earth-shattering voice and something pure behind it. Something that speaks to both the joy and darkness of life, and how the two aspects of this, well, Sad and Beautiful World, are inherently linked. You can’t have one without the other.
As Dylan himself once put it, “Mavis was a great singer—deep and mysterious. And even at the young age, I felt that life itself was a mystery”.
As the canny among you would have already worked out, this voice is something that had to have been discovered ludicrously early on in the life of Mavis Staples. Around the same time that most of us are still figuring out what music even is and what about it we actually like, Staples’ father, Roebuck ‘Pops’ Staples, discovered that his daughter was arguably the best singer in her family. Considering that the family was a travelling gospel group, and Mavis was all of eight, that’s saying quite a bit.
How did Mavis Staples discover her love for singing?
That’s all well and good, but as we know from the dark side of the Jackson family, just because a patriarch spots talent in you at an extraordinarily early age, it doesn’t mean that’s what you want at the time. People need a childhood, and any kind of working when you’re that young is still child labour, no matter how much it might be the kind of work people dream of having; fortunately, this wasn’t the case with Mavis herself.
In an interview with SFJAZZ publication, On The Corner, Staples was asked whether she had a “eureka” moment in her early life where she realised that singing wasn’t just a talent, but what she’d commit her life to doing. She immediately picked on her early experiences singing in church, when her voice was so pure and powerful that the parishioners would come up to her in tears afterwards to shake the hand of this pre-teen girl.
She said, “At first, when I saw the people crying, I asked my mother: I said, ‘Mama, what did I do to those people to make them cry?’ And she said, ‘Baby, you singin’, they’re crying because they love what you’re doing. You’re makin’ ‘em feel good’.” Thus, Staples started as she meant to go on. Perhaps that’s why she’s such an authority on what makes a Sad and Beautiful World. To move someone means to show them both sides of the world, which Mavis Staples has been doing since 1950. May we see her like again sometime soon.
