Description
Label Review.
2017 album produced by Jeff Tweedy.
Our Overview.
Best known as the lead vocalist of the Staple Singers, a family soul-gospel ensemble that flourished from the 1950s through the 1970s and beyond, Mavis Staples has also released a series of albums as a solo artist. Her voice, not a gospel power-house, was instantly compelling with its deep-like-a-river quality of moral conviction. Over her long career, Staples won other musicians, including Bob Dylan and Prince as admirers, and her solo work, which had never quite found its course among the shifting winds of musical fashion, won new recognition with the release of her 2004 album, ‘Have a Little Faith’. In 2005 Staples was set to accept a Grammy award for lifetime achievement on behalf of the Staple Singers, of whom she was the last surviving original member.
Mavis Staples was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 10, 1939 her father, Roebuck "Pops" Staples, had grown up on Mississippi's Dockery Plantation, a key site in the development of the blues, and had learned to play the guitar from the great early bluesman Charley Patton. After he moved north to Chicago in 1936 he began to organise gospel quartets after finishing work at a meatpacking plant, and it was gospel that Mavis Staples heard at home, she says. "He used to play records by the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Soul Sisters, the Blind Boys of Mississippi as well as the Blind Boys of Alabama, but after I heard [gospel great] Mahalia [Jackson] sing 'Move On Up a Little Higher,' I had to play her music every day,”.
Now this soul legend releases her sixteenth studio album ‘If All I Was Was Black’ hot on the release of 2016 album, ‘Livin’ On A High Note’ which saw the legendary singer singing songs written by a cadre of famous songwriters; her new album, sees her once again teaming up with Jeff Tweedy. It’s their third partnership following 2010’s ‘You Are Not Alone’ and 2013’s ‘One True Vine’, both of which were nominated for Grammys (You Are Not Alone won), and I’f All I Was Was Black’ will be made up entirely of original songs that Tweedy wrote with Staples in mind.
"We're not loving one another the way we should," Staples said in a statement. "Some people are saying they want to make the world great again, but we never lost our greatness. We just strayed into division." As Staples sings on the title track, "It's time for more love."
Tweedy said of ‘If All I Was Was Black’ in a statement, "I've always thought of art as a political statement in and of itself – that it was enough to be on the side of creation and not destruction. But there is something that feels complicit at this moment in time about not facing what is happening in this country head on."
Fabulous lady, fabulous album.