Review | The Mighty Mavis, Still on a Mission

When Mavis Staples sings, what exudes from her mouth is the soulful rasp of age, firmly linked to the sound of rock of ages. As witnessed in her latest Santa Barbara concert, last week in the Arlington Theatre, Staples has the rare ability to seize our love and attention in the present tense while recognizing her lofty place in musical history. The last survivor of the powerfully influential Staples Singers, who deftly migrated from the gospel world to the R&B/pop world without losing its core agenda, Staples is by now a bona fide queen of the gospel-soul realm.

As proof of her natural ability to transcend typecasting or formatting, she was hitting the Arlington — a show presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures — after recent shows at the Monterey Jazz Festival and San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. She’s hardly strictly genre-bound, when it comes to her appeal, and she has the knack for turning any venue into an ecumenical church tent/party zone.

In a way, the deeply rooted influence of gospel on many American music forms — in pop, country, Americana, and other forms beyond just R&B — is reflected in the ascendant band The War and Treaty, which opened the Arlington show in a blaze of joyful fervor. The decade-old and much-acclaimed band led by husband-and-wife team of Michael and Tanya Trotter has concocted a juicy musical house blend. Gospel stirs in seamlessly with country (they are anointed by the Country Hall of Fame, Grand Ole Opry, and other Nashville heavyweights), blues, and other musical sauces.

After kicking off and kicking up dust with their version of “Proud Mary,” Michael Trotter told the crowd, “We came to sprinkle some love on all of you.” For her part, Staples had her own mission statement for the crowd: to “give you some joy, happiness, inspiration, and positive vibrations.” It was that kind of a night, and the crowd seemed more than willing to receive the blessings in song. 

The Trotters’ set was highlighted by Tanya’s stirring rendition of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”; their recent hit with country singer Zach Bryan, “Hey Driver”; and a fitting, high-flying finale from the heart of gospel rhetoric, “Can I Get an Amen?”

Although The War and Treaty’s six-piece band featured the standard gospel-ized patina of the Hammond B3 organ, Staples’s current band is lean but potent, with a rhythm section of guitarist Rick Holmstrom and a reliably solid bass-drum foundation (Greg Boaz and Steve Mugalian, respectively). Her surrogate “Staples Singers” choir-ette, Saundra Williams and Kelly Hogan, supplied savory background vocals, adding rich vocal fiber to such Staples Singers tunes as “City in the Sky,” “Handwriting on the Wall,” and the moving closer, “Freedom’s Highway.”

Staples shifted easily into the sassier end of the spectrum on another Staples Singers staple, “Respect Yourself” — in a more reverential version than Etta James’s toothier take. Staples also moved right into the groove of the Talking Heads’ tune “Slippery People,” itself one of countless rock songs — like “Take Me to the River” — bowing to the influence of gospel music.

At age 85, Staples is still fighting the good fight and doing the Lord’s work, whatever the spiritual inclination (or lack thereof) of her legion of fans.