There’s a recording I hold close, Joan Armatrading’s “Woncha Come on Home.” When the song was released in 1977, it was common for music producers to double-track vocal lines, recording two nearly identical takes and layering them on top of each other to produce a full, uniform sound. The vocals in “Woncha Come on Home,” too, are doubly layered, but with a difference. Rather than merging into a solitary fullness, Armatrading’s two voices harmonize but stay distinct, a split self shifting irresolutely between one and two parts. In “Woncha Come on Home,” thickness of voice isn’t matched by lush instrumentation. It’s just her, a guitar, and, bracing her appeal (“Oh babe, won’t ya come on home?”), the purposeful rise and fall of an mbira. On both instruments she accompanies herself.

The song’s gravelly, low-register refrain, “you know I hate to be alone,” is suffused with achy warmth. Marring that warmth is a certain danger: three variations on “there’s a madman standing at the corner/And he keeps on looking at my window.” On the surface, an intruder. But is he the enemy of her desire or its object—the “you” she sings to—or both? Is the onlooker also the listener, peering into her home? Is he Armatrading, constructing the home with her lyrics and fabricating it with instrument and voice?  

“Woncha Come on Home” seems like a love song, but the sharpest focus lands on objects: the street corner, the window, the empty room where “every light is on.” The music sounds intimate, raw, and immediate, even though (and also because) it’s been fed through the machine. It’s the loneliest duet I’ve ever heard. Nothing really came close until I heard Mavis Staples’s 1996 recording of “Stand By Me.”

Searching and sturdy, Staples’s “Stand By Me” draws on the same source as Ben E. King’s swoony (and very different) R&B love song: the turn-of-the-century hymn by the Black composer Charles Albert Tindley, who also wrote “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” later revised into the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” As if to rebut Ahab’s cry from the churning waters of Stubb’s boat—“Help me, man; I wish to stand”—Tindley’s lyrics appeal to God: “When the storms of life are raging, stand by me.”

Staples’s solo version of “Stand By Me” builds on two earlier recordings she made of the song with the Staple Singers, the family quartet that inaugurated and helped define her career, in 1955 and 1961. Here she sings it a cappella in duet with herself. Pivoting between supporter and interlocutor, she echoes her own words and moans in wordless repartee, a harrowing and self-contained system carried through her voices. Like Armatrading, she entreats the listener to accompany her. The appeal is still to God—“Lord you know it, you know all about it Lord, stand by me”—but not exclusively; as in Armatrading’s song, the “you” here is a little loose. The listener is at once implicated in the story and nudged outside it, asked to enter with the understanding that the world each song cultivates will only sometimes let them in.

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“Stand By Me” comes from the album Spirituals & Gospel, which is dedicated to Staples’s mentor, Mahalia Jackson. Jackson was a gospel superstar in her lifetime, and so she rarely shared lead vocals. She made an exception at the Harlem Cultural Festival. Known colloquially as “Black Woodstock” for its Black performers and nearly all-Black audience, the festival took uptown New York City the same summer as Woodstock took upstate New York, with attendees sprawling across Mount Morris Park to hear songs of the Black freedom struggle set to soul, funk, gospel, Motown, R&B, blues, Afro-Cuban jazz, and pop.

Just one year after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., who once said that “a voice like hers comes along once in a millennium,” Jackson was sitting onstage during a speech by Jesse Jackson, preparing to sing King’s favorite song, the tenacious spiritual “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” But she wasn’t feeling well, so she leaned over to Mavis and asked her to help. It’s astonishing to watch them together: Mahalia disarranging the earth with her cries, thirty-year-old Mavis glowing in white lace, leaning into their shared microphone, trading verses and crescendo-ing hold me lords. In duet, Mavis was a disciple and a torchbearer, not so much an added layer of vocal harmony as a lead and a supporter at once.

The performance stands out in Mavis’s career, but by troubling the opposition between background and lead, chorus and soloist, Mavis was doing what she has done since she first performed professionally onstage (as a child, standing on a chair to reach her microphone). Like most soul, doo-wop, R&B, and Motown artists, she started singing in her local church, where soloists often move in and out of the choir. In Greek theater, one function of the chorus is to link the stage and the seats, responding to and occasionally guiding the drama. The gospel choir is connective in its own way: its singers are also congregants, people who stand onstage and sit in the pews. Much popular music reverses this formation. It’s the frontman, the soloist, the lead who reaches into the audience’s hearts, the other vocalists harmonizing behind them. Mavis’s singing suggests a more horizontal mode of musical creation, even when she’s at the front of the stage herself.

The Stapleses sang together for the first time when Mavis was about eight, when her father, Roebuck, a guitarist and singer who everyone called “Pops,” came home frustrated from a group rehearsal for which nobody showed and taught Mavis and three of her siblings—Pervis, Cleotha, and Yvonne—the parts to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a song he used to sing with his family on the front gallery of their home on Dockery Plantation in the Delta region of Mississippi. Soon they started performing together, first on the local church circuit and then throughout the South. In footage from until as late as 1968 they use a variety of setups: one mic for everyone, two shared between shifting configurations of the group, one each for Pops and Mavis and one between Cleotha and Yvonne or Cleotha and Pervis, one for each member of the group. On stage they practiced a close, energetic call-and-response, while the teenaged Mavis developed a synchronous rapport with the audience, eliciting cries and moans in step with the rhythm of her siblings. Her biographer, Greg Kot, relates that it was watching the popular gospel singers Ruth Davis and Dorothy Love Coates that taught her how to work the crowd.¹

In the Staple Singers’ early recordings Mavis similarly asserted her presence in the permeable foreground—a player in a human drama, not its only star. Their first hit, the sea-swept and otherworldly “Uncloudy Day,” is split in two: a minute and a half of chorus, then a minute and a half of Mavis pulling that chorus slowly apart, with her father and siblings urging her on. The first half borrows from ballad structure, starting with an a-b-b-c rhyme scheme that’s proximal to the ballad’s a-b-c-b. Adapting the tradition of the Homeric epic poem in slant, in the song’s first line the Stapleses invoke a kind of everyman muse: “Woah—they tell me,” where “they” could be anyone on earth or on high. The first stanza, “Woah—they tell me/Of a home/Where no storm/Clouds rise,” pairs “home” with “storm,” a tension that’s revivified by breaking “un” from “cloudy” in the fourth stanza: “Woah they tell me/Of an un—/Cloudy day.” That “Uncloudy Day” shifts between quatrain and tercet in this way gives the song the character of a blues stanza, whose three-line structure often punctuates two repeated or rhyming lines with a twisted third. When Mavis enters, interjecting—but continuing, not interrupting—she turns chorus into refrain, modifying minutely as the chorus urges beneath her, “Yes, oh yes, they tell me.”

When the Staple Singers came on the scene they fit a number of existing archetypes. They were a quartet, a family group, performers of traditional spirituals, part of the early twentieth-century exodus from Mississippi to Chicago, imbibers of church gospel and street soul. But from the beginning their sound was marked by differences that still pique the ear more than half a century later. Young Mavis’s sandpaper-scratched vocals atop Pops’s crystalline tenor, soft and sweet. Thick harmonies that reached in and out of minor key. Varied pacing, handclap syncopation, and bluesy chords, harkening back to an earlier moment in Southern blues and spirituals. Vocals sparsely adorned—not by backing band or by piano but by Pops’s wandering, liquid guitar.

The Soul Stirrers guitarist Leroy Crume told Kot that Pops created his “nervous,” ambient sound, which was more closely associated with rock ‘n’ roll than gospel, by modifying a Fender Twin amp with a “little gadget” (what Pops called a “foot tremolo”), probably some iteration of the recently marketed DeArmond tremolo unit that Bo Diddley used to construct the pulsing atmosphere of his self-titled 1955 song. Tremolo is the modified volume of a note, but the result is basically spatial. Ry Cooder called it “an environmental sound.” It makes it feel like the floor is wobbling and the walls are suddenly permeable. It invokes a confusion of the material and something else—maybe the spiritual? With her ear to his sound, Mavis grounds the unmoored melodies of Pops’s blues-era guitar in her deep, husky voice.

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The Staple Singers started with traditional gospel hymns, but their immersion in the church hardly kept any of them from the many other social worlds of Black musical innovation. As a child living and laboring at Dockery Plantation, Pops sang in the church choir and eventually joined a gospel quartet called the Golden Trumpets. He also put down fifty cents a week to buy a five-dollar Stella guitar from the hardware store and taught himself to play, taking in the emotive slide and picking styles of the region—exemplified by the melodic force and fortitude of another Dockery resident, Charley Patton—and gigging in the local Chitlin Circuit. In 1933 he married Oceola Ware, and three years later they moved to Chicago with Cleotha and baby Pervis in tow; it took a year for Pops to save the twelve dollars the family needed to afford the bus fare. Mavis grew up in the South Side in Bronzeville (what they called the “Dirty Thirties” neighborhood), a blue-collar Black community that was home to some of the world’s greatest musicians, like Louis Armstrong, Dinah Washington, and, in the summers, the Staples’s family friend Aretha Franklin. From her corner of Chicago she also absorbed jazz standards and bebop in local theaters, James Brown on the jukebox, blues tumbling out from nightclubs, and the new music from a buzzing neighborhood scene—Lou Rawls and Sam Cooke (with whom Pervis used to sing under the street lights) and so many more—that would be essential in birthing soul and doo-wop.

It was Pops who compelled the Staple Singers to cross over into folk, R&B, and soul. A decade into their recording career, when the cultural power of folk musicians like Peter, Paul and Mary was cemented on the pop charts and in civil rights protest circuits, the group started incorporating more songs that were folk music at one angle, gospel at another: “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” “Old Time Religion,” “This Train.” They covered Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan; at Martin Luther King Jr.’s rallies, they performed his favorite of their songs, “Why? (Am I Treated So Bad).” By the early Seventies their hallmark had become gospel-hued social music, “message songs” like “When Will We Be Paid” and “Respect Yourself” and “Freedom Highway.” A Jet magazine cover story called them a “gospel-folk rock group” that “sell[s] soul with a gospel beat.” An advertisement from their label at the time, Stax Records, classified their music as “gospel, rock, rhythm and blues,” a specification—and diversification—from a decade earlier, when Billboard gave them the awkward genre-blurring label of “stirring spiritual Americana.”

Before the Staple Singers “crossed over,” some of them initially hesitated to loosen their music’s sanctified strings. When Cleotha told her dad that she believed they should stay in gospel, thinking that the message songs “had a little too much beat,” he sidestepped the topic of sound completely. “Boo, I think you should be a little more open-minded about this,” he said, in a scene recounted by Cleotha in Kot’s biography of Mavis and the Staple Singers, I’ll Take You There. “It’s a tremendous chance for us to give a message. Now, Dr. King is saying it. We can sing it. What’s wrong with that?”

The Stapleses recorded their first two Stax albums at the label’s studio in Memphis, singing their parts after the house musicians had already laid down the accompaniment. By contrast, Be Altitude: Respect Yourself, their fourth record for the label, came together in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where the group worked with a legendary rhythm section known as “the Swampers” to capture their discursive, call-and-response style to an extent they had not previously achieved on record. “I’ll Take You There,” the band’s first chart-topping hit, is still one of the great singles in American music. Its bassline quotes Harry J Allstars’s hypnotic reggae track “The Liquidator”—building a sort of international antiphony with musicians in Jamaica who were themselves drawing on soul—while Mavis’s loose, easy vocals conjure another world (in the sky?) by describing what it lacks:

I know a place—ah
Ain’t nobody cryin’
Ain’t nobody worried—no
Ain’t no smilin’ faces—mmm mmm, no no

Now the rest of the group joins her: “Lyin’ to the races.” Alone again, she calls them back (“Help me, come on, come on/Somebody help me now”), and then gets what she asks for, her voice dropping out as the rest of the group moves in: “I’ll take you there.”

As the song begins to loop, Mavis moves from “Help me y’all” to “Oh, let me take you there,” joining in the chorus even though her voice remains distinct, her father and siblings sending the offer back in her direction. And then Mavis shifts her attention from family to players, starting with the Muscle Shoals keyboardist Barry Beckett. Above and alongside his rapid trill, she sings: “Play it Barry, play your—play your piano now.” In The Undercommons, cowritten with the scholar and activist Stefano Harney, the poet and theorist Fred Moten takes Mavis’s ad-libs as an example of an anarchic Black aesthetic tradition, what Moten and Harney call “study.” “That’s the heart of the song,” Moten argues. “It’s just her saying, ‘play,’ and they’re already playing. And that’s not a call to order. It’s an acknowledgment, and a celebration, of what was already happening.” This dynamic reappears, slightly altered, in the song’s final movement, Mavis gorgeously lengthening and breaking down and building up the chorus as it unfolds. She goes back and forth with Pops, Cleotha, and Yvonne as they layer the reprise, the group staging perpetual motion, stretching it for as long as a 45pm record allows.

According to the album’s producer, Al Bell, one take of “I’ll Take You There” lasted thirty minutes. As it stands the song feels tantalizingly short. What remains is the feeling of heading somewhere together, everyone leading everyone else, so that any “I” dissolves in transit, a kind of deferred communal heaven in sound.

To my ear, the only moment in the song that displaces the direct relation between artists is Mavis’s call-out to Pops:

Play on it, play on it, big daddy, now
Daddy—daddy, daddy, play your, mmm

The guitar solo that rings out under her voice is not her father’s; it belongs to Eddie Hinton, guitarist for the all-white house band, who was mimicking the style of the group’s patriarch. There’s some disagreement about whether Mavis signaled to her father this way in-studio, or if it was overdubbed later with their live shows in mind. Either way, by hailing her dad, she at once creates his presence and gives substance to his absence—anticipating, ultimately, his death years later, in 2000, knowing that his sound wouldn’t leave her even after he was gone.

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Over the course of her career Mavis would experiment with just about every type of beat in the American vernacular. The Stapleses would expand into funk and reggae-infused soul, to which her solo albums would add pop, disco, and even yacht rock. (If you want to hear Mavis do the Doobie Brothers, check out “You’re Made That Way” off 1979’s Oh What A Feeling, which she has disavowed.) Prince sought her out in 1987; the pair exchanged letters, and he repurposed their correspondence to form the basis for The Voice, the second (and better) of the two albums they made together.

Their partnership brought Mavis out of the nostalgia circuit, laying the groundwork for future connections with artists from Ry Cooder to Jeff Tweedy. In the subsequent decades she has developed a true late style, working closely and generously with artists who are often many years her junior, creating a platform for herself in a contemporary renaissance of gospel-steeped Americana.

Since Spirituals & Gospel, her 1996 collaboration with Lucky Peterson, Mavis has focused much of her repertoire on blues-laced and soul-inflected spirituals, gospel music imbued explicitly with social messages, and “message songs” imbued with the insight and inflection of blues, gospel, and soul. In 2008’s Live: Hope at the Hideout, her first live performance album, the venue encourages the sound: a nearly 150-year-old balloon-frame house bar in the West Side of Chicago, stage low to the ground and packed with Mavis’s players, audience capped at around a hundred, intimate and charged. Recorded during the summer of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and released on election day, the concert gathered civil rights–era freedom songs with Staple Singers classics: “This Little Light,” “Freedom Highway,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

On Hope at the Hideout, Mavis’s performance of the nineteenth-century Black spiritual “Wade in the Water” bombastically anchors the sacred and the secular. Here she’s assertive, guttural, and deep, voice locked in dialogue with Rick Holmstrom’s blues guitar licks and with her own gospel chorus. (Thomas A. Dorsey, the “father of the gospel blues,” told Michael W. Harris that blues and spirituals are animated by “the same feeling, a grasping of the heart.” Mavis calls the genres “first cousins.”) That chorus includes her sister Yvonne, at the time the only other living Staple Singer. The song’s chorus, for its part, asks the listener to embrace difficulty in order to move through it: “Wade in the water/Wade in the water/Wade in the water/God’s gonna trouble the water.” Its imperative points to the Israelites fleeing Egypt when God parted the sea—or to enslaved Black people fleeing their bondage, moving through water to mask their scent. God may be “troubling” the water to aid the traveler, or it may be to produce the struggle. Either way, the appeal is for the listener to endure in and through their fight for survival. (James H. Cone, the father of Black Theology: “The spiritual, then, is the spirit of the people struggling to be free.” Or: “Black history is a spiritual!”)

Much of Mavis’s late music feels borne of and through her experience of collective struggle in the civil rights era. The cover image of We Get By (2019)—released midway through Donald Trump’s first presidency and just over a decade after the hopeful moment regenerated in Live: Hope at the Hideout—is a 1956 photo of Black children looking through a chain-link fence taken by the civil rights–era photojournalist and Essence cofounder Gordon Parks. A collaboration with the genre-deviant singer-songwriter Ben Harper, the album opens with a song whose refrain encompasses variations on “Things gonna change around here.” Like its predecessor If All I Was Was Black (2017), which forthrightly channels the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, the album is explicitly political.

The central drama in “We Get By,” a serene, country soul–tinged groove charted in duet between Harper and Staples, is the feeling of hearing from an old friend:

She was going through changes once again
Matters of the head, matters of the heart
Maybe too early to tell, but it’s never too late to start

The album generally circumnavigates its subjects rather than pointing at them directly. (“Oh, it reminds me of a story,” Mavis sings on the album’s lead single. “Tell you later if you don’t mind.”) But it also hinges on these allusions to the personal. In Mavis’s catalog, intimacy is the language of freedom, and so in its own way “We Get By” also showcases her orientation towards movement-building. It reaffirms a recurring theme in her music: the importance, even necessity, of putting trust in the people around you. No “I” gets by alone.

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Last November Mavis released her fourteenth solo studio album, Sad and Beautiful World. The record is composed almost entirely of covers, ranging from the jagged R&B of Frank Ocean to Leonard Cohen’s rock poetry and Mark Linkous’s early-aughts cult indie outfit Sparklehorse. The list of contributing musicians and songwriters includes Katie Crutchfield, MJ Lenderman, Bonnie Raitt, Allison Russell, and Kara Jackson, giving the album the feeling of an Americana-style musical revue. It feels a little like the Newport Folk Festival stage, where the Staple Singers first performed in 1964, alongside artists like Mavis’s old flame Bob Dylan. At recent Newports, Mavis has become one of the signature acts, reaching a level of crossover recognition that had been denied to her since the Staple Singers’ Seventies peak. In 2014 she celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday with a headlining set. I was sitting with a group of little kids watching a friend cover Skip James at the children’s area when she took the stage, but I managed to run fast enough to reach the inner crowd for her opener, a resoundingly uptempo “If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me).”

This is Mavis’s first album where she entirely sustains an intimate, lower register (with the exception, maybe, of the album’s opening track, an R&B-restyled version of “Chicago,” Tom Waits’s rumble through the Great Migration)—a stark contrast to her early Stax album Only for the Lonely, where the audio peaks, unable to contain her, whenever she lets it rip. Here each song is a measured, soulful reflection on the search for peace in a world where freedom is a constant struggle. The most pointed critique is “Beautiful Strangers,” written by the singer-songwriter Kevin Morby and tracked just after “Chicago” to organize the album’s mood. Ambling gently forward, the song’s lyrics produce a lengthened state of danger. It opens in a storm and ends in sleep, its hypotheticals crescendoing over time: “if you ever hear that thunder,” “if you ever hear that crying,” “if I lose my voice,” and eventually, the closest thing we get to a chorus, the start of the song’s refrain, “if I die too young.”

In “Beautiful Strangers,” the narrator, singing in the speculative mode, is both witness to and bearer of experience, shifting constantly between “I” and “you”: “If you ever hear that gunshot/You may think ‘bout what you do but you don’t got/Say a prayer/Think of mother/I am a rock.” The occasional oblique reference to tragedies that most listeners will recognize tips the hypothetical into reality. “Forty-nine dead” for the people shot at Pulse, the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016. “Oh I’m sorry/Oh I’m sorry/Freddie Gray,” for the twenty-five-year-old Black man unjustly arrested and brutalized to death by the Baltimore police. (I also hear “I’ll Be Rested” from Mavis’s excellent 2007 collaboration with Cooder, We’ll Never Turn Back: a kind of mourner’s kaddish for American civil rights activists and Black children who “died just trying/to live and breathe,” followed by the “heavenly choir” of Black gospel singers who passed on—Mahalia Jackson, Dorothy Love Coates, Pops Staples.) The song lives in the empathetic place between the first and second person, weaving between not just “I” and “you” but also “I” and “stranger.”

To listen to Sad and Beautiful World is to listen as well to all the preceding decades during which Mavis sharpened her skills as an artist living and working in a changing world. In this sense, late Mavis songs like this one never feel self-contained. The album ends with Eddie Hinton’s “Everybody Needs Love,” an enthusiastic celebration of romantic, neighborly, and religious intimacy. When Mavis sings it, it’s as if she’s also singing the title track from her 2010 Tweedy collaboration You Are Not Alone, which emphasizes the material conditions of solidarity: “Isolated and afraid/Open up this is a raid/I wanna get it through to you/You’re not alone.” This expansive sense that the songs call back to one another is neither accidental nor attributable to her collaborators. It is central to her orientation as an artist, connecting her both to her own body of work and to the people around her. Each new recording becomes a history of motion, but also an invitation to go there together.