Gospel According to the Sources

Last weekend at the 67th Monterey Jazz Festival, the gospel eminence grise Mavis Staples took to the stage of the main area stage, and instantly won the love and support of the 4,000-plus-strong congregation there. Not that this was surprising. The now 85-year-old Staples, the beloved and renowned surviving member of the Staples Singers — led by Pops Staples and hugely popular both in gospel and popular music circles — has long been considered a premiere proponent of gospel and its secular offspring, soul/R&B music.

But this was a special occasion in that the historic Monterey festival, in its first edition directed by new head Darin Atwater, had a strong gospel theme running through it. The queen was in good programming company. She led her band, with a compact choir of harmony singers in the mix, through a spiritual-secular setlist, from “Respect Yourself” to the Talking Heads’ “Slippery People,” “For What It’s Worth” and the stirring gospel tune “Far Celestial Shore” — all with that rich, gutsy Staples stamp.

When Staples returns to Santa Barbara to play at the Arlington Theatre on Tuesday, October 8, a show hosted by UCSB Arts & Lectures, she will be the reigning gospel queen in a mini-gospel festival for a night, which also features the much-buzzed-about act The War and Treaty. Led by the married couple Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Trotter, The War and Treaty has risen to great heights and broken through barriers in its 10 years in the scene.

Anointed by the Country Music Hall of Fame, garnering Grammy nominations and hosannas from the Americana sphere, the Trotters have won accolades for their distinctive home brew of gospel, country, rock, and the rich soil of soul music in various forms. As heard on their hits “Hey Driver” (with Zach Brown) and “Five More Minutes” (with Emmylou Harris) and a four-title discography through last year’s Lover’s Game, the Trotters embody the idea that their hybridized sound is more about happy American musical kinships than eclecticism, as such.

Staples’s long and productive career, with her family and in solo mode, has encompassed many collaborations, activism, and fruitful collaborations and artist-producers reverential to her work and legacy: Her last album, 2019’s We Get By, was produced by Ben Harper, and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy produced both 2010’s Healing Tide and 2017’s If All I Was Was Black.

In an interview, Staples told me about a pivotal moment in her family band’s life during the early ‘60s, when they slipped across the border between the gospel world and the rhythm and blues realm. “We sang for years before we knew that Pops was playing the blues on his guitar,” she relates. “Duke Ellington described us one time — ‘The Staples Singers are singing gospel songs with a bluesy feel.’ I would always ask Daddy, ‘Why do people want us to come to blues festivals?’ We were singing gospel and church songs, but we had a sound and all types of music was in there, including folk music and country. It was just a unique sound, and that came from Pops, of course.

“When I was 20 years old, I was on Stax records, and I made a solo album. They asked me what I would like to sing. I wanted to do some songs that were different from what we’d been singing. I told them I had to sing ‘Since I Fell for You,’” her first considerable hit, in 1970.

When it came out, Staples was eager to play it for her grandmother, who had chastised and hit her for singing blues songs when staying with her in Mississippi as a child. Staples remembers, “I got the album and I called her: `Grandma Ware, come on in here in the living room. I want you to hear something.’ I put that record on and she said, `You little old booger. You didn’t forget that, did you?’ I said `No ma’am. But you can’t get me now.’ She just laughed. I had to let her hear it.”

Through the ups and down of her life and career, Staples has drawn on an inner well of strength, bolstered by her faith — and deep family wisdom. “When I’m down or when things have happened in my life,” she said, “I just don’t let it take me all the way out. Man, I’ll tell you, I have had some things happen. I just pick myself up. Pops always taught us to think positive and be positive. I think, ‘Well, maybe some good will come out of this.’ I can’t stop now. I’ve come too far to turn around. I’ve got to keep pressing on, keep on pushing.”

In this late career phase, Staples may have slowed down by degrees, but the mission propels her ever forward. 

“I have so much more I want to say and I have so much energy. I have my voice and I really feel that’s my gift. That’s my gift from God. I don’t know any music. I don’t even know what key I sing in half the time. So I feel that if I don’t sing, I’d be abusing a blessing, because it was given to me. It brought me so much joy and so much happiness, to be able to go out there and sing and look at the faces of people in the audience,” she said.

“Whatever knocks me down…. Satan, get thee behind me. Get out of my way. Don’t try to hinder me, because I have work to do.”

See Mavis Staples and The War and The Treaty at the Arlington Theatre on October 8 at 7:30 p.m. Click here for more information.