I'll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the March Up Freedom's Highway by Greg Kot

Author:Greg Kot [Kot, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
ISBN: 9781451647853
Amazon: 1451647859
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2014-01-20T11:00:00+00:00

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Back to the motherland

It was a party fifty thousand feet in the sky, a summit of entertainers from the worlds of soul, gospel, and jazz stuffed into a charter jet with musical equipment and luggage. The sweet aroma of marijuana mingled with impromptu jam sessions in the aisles. There were Ike and Tina Turner chatting with Carlos Santana, the Staple Singers laughing with Les McCann, Wilson Pickett strutting like he owned the place. So many stars, so little room in business class: Roberta Flack, the Voices of East Harlem, Willie Bobo, and Pervis Staples’s old pool-shooting pal from the South Side, Eddie Harris.

On March 1, 1971, the Staple Singers were among 130 artists, moviemakers, and roadies aboard a DC-8 at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City bound for the West African nation of Ghana. They were to perform a major concert at historic Black Star Square in the capital city of Accra, next to the Atlantic Ocean. It would be the Staples family’s first trip to what they and many of their fellow passengers called the “motherland.”

Many aboard the flight were returning to the home of their ancestors, who had come to America against their will, sold as slaves. Now Ghana was in many ways going through the kind of social and political upheaval that accompanied the birth of the United States centuries before.

In 1957 Ghana had declared independence from Great Britain, the first African country to become a self-contained state in modern times. Guiding this transition into a new era was Kwame Nkrumah, who advocated Pan-Africanism as a way to bring the Third World continent closer to economic parity with the West and link it with people of African heritage worldwide. But Nkrumah was deposed in 1966, and the country had been under military rule ever since. Yet the government gave the go-ahead to stage the concert at Black Star Square, an edifice built by Nkrumah in 1957 to commemorate independence. The connections to the American civil rights movement were profound, right down to the way the word “freedom” had been co-opted since the military coup d’état.

At the Kotoka International Airport in Accra, the musicians were greeted by cheering, costumed locals on the tarmac and the terminal rooftop. Several passengers descended the airplane’s steps and kissed the ground, out of respect for their hosts. Pickett was greeted by Ghanaians loudly chanting his name, and then was offered a swig of the local corn-made gin. Ever the showman, the “Wicked Pickett” reeled and pretended to collapse after sipping the homemade libation.

The festive atmosphere extended to the hotel, where the musicians dined on pepper soup, palm-nut stew, and jolof rice, and danced with the townspeople, while attentive geckos gawked at them. Most of the visitors tried to adapt to the new diet, participate in the dances, and fit in with the locals as much as possible. But Ike Turner couldn’t be bothered, according to Mavis. “He made quite a scene,” she recalls. “He would walk around in these gray satin Daisy Duke shorts, with black hands on each side [of the bottom].

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