Holding the Note by David Remnick

Author:David Remnick [Remnick, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

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Backstage at Wolf Trap, Staples and her band prepared for the show as they often do, by singing a gospel tune, “Wonderful Savior.” Sometimes, particularly in the South, Staples might get a crowd that is racially mixed, but not often. It’s been a long time since she could measure her performance by the number of shouts and “amen”s from an audience; no one at Wolf Trap was likely to require a deacon to fan them back into consciousness. Those gospel theatrics and emotions belong to a different world. And modern gospel—whether it is Kirk Franklin’s hip-hop-inflected music or the vast number of choirs in churches across the country or Kanye West’s Sunday Service Choir—is not a presence for most of these listeners. All the same, Staples will sometimes have her guitar player, Rick Holmstrom, sneak a look at the audience. “I can sense a difference in her when we get an amen corner with even some pockets of African Americans—it changes the vibe,” he told me. “I’ll peek, and she’ll say, ‘How does it look? Slim and his brother None?’ I’ll say, ‘I don’t think it’s a “Weight” night.’ That means there’s some Black folks. We can lean on soul and gospel. A ‘Weight’ night would be when it’s a white crowd.”

The Staple Singers, like their leading Black brethren in the blues, have always had a reverent audience of white musicians. One of the first singles the Rolling Stones recorded was “The Last Time,” a hit in 1965, which is credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards but was inspired by a Staple Singers recording from a decade before. Pops Staples didn’t mind; the tune is from a traditional gospel song. Then the Stones’ management asked the Staple Singers to open for them on their 1972 tour. By now, Pops had shifted the group into more popular material. Singles like “I’ll Take You There” might have displeased some gospel purists, but they widened the group’s appeal and made them wealthy. No matter. The Stones offered the Staple Singers a paltry five hundred dollars a night. Pops turned them down. “I’d like to think Mick Jagger doesn’t know about this,” he told a reporter for Variety.

Mavis Staples has no patience for segregation, in politics or in music. She is at once sure-minded about the essential place of Black composers and performers in American music and open to singing with anyone who can keep up. Over and over in recent years, she has been a presence in that gumbo genre known as Americana. Among her albums in that vein is a sentimental one called Carry Me Home, recordings that she did in 2011 with Levon Helm, at his barn in Woodstock. Helm, who died in 2012, was suffering from throat cancer; he was terribly thin, his voice raspy and weak, and yet together they rise to the occasion, collaborating on Curtis Mayfield’s protest anthem “This Is My Country,” Dylan’s gospel song “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “The Weight,” and, yes, “This May Be the Last Time.

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