“I’m not as frisky as I used to be but I feel like I am,” Mavis Staples speaks the truth with a grin and a twinkle in Mavis!, an endearingly upbeat bio doc premiering on HBO tonight (Monday, February 29). Appearing early in the month for a sneak preview at Chicago’s Du Sable Museum, the 76-year-old
Mavis Staples performs with guitarist Rick Holmstrom at the preview of Mavis!, an HBO documentary, at Chicago’s DuSable Museum (FAB PHOTO).
Chicago fireball with a deep gritty voice had the vitality to fool anyone — it also overflows from her new album Livin’ On A High Note. She mixed merrily with the crowd, watched the show from a seat in the theater, then sang two songs backed by her tour band guitarist Rick Holmstrom. She still gets shouts from the house, seemingly as irrepressibly spunky as 50 years ago, when the Staple Singers stirred positive messages, gospel certainty and bluesy guitar (courtesy of her father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples) into a soundtrack for the Civil Rights movement and crossover hits of (as Mavis says) “joy, inspiration, and good vibrations!”
Pops, Yvonne, Pervis and Mavis Staples – Jazz da Gama
Performance clips from back in the days when the Staples decided they could sing what the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King preached, when Mavis flirted with Bob Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival and when “Respect Yourself” was heard on AM radio across the nation, are among the joys of Mavis!, edited cogently by director Jessica Edwards with more recent footage of Mavis with Levon Helm and Jeff Tweedy, commentary by admirers Bonnie Raitt, Chuck D, Sharon Jones, writers Anthony (The Gospel Sound) Heilbut and Greg Kot, the Staples’ biographer. Mavis’ memories of growing up on Chicago’s south side with neighbors including Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler, of driving with Pops, her sisters and brother across the south when Jim Crow was still enforced, and of giving rocker anthems like “Blowing in the Wind,” “For What It’s Worth” and “The Weight” the Staples’ trademark “freedom songs” treatment are at the base, as well, of Living’ On A High Note, which dropped February 19, with Mavis working through new songs written by contemporary traditionalists including Benjamin Booker, Ben Harper, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Jon Batiste, Neko Case, Nick Cave and producer M. Ward.
Mavis, left, with her sister Yvonne ©Joe Alper Photo Collection LLC
Any independent black career in entertainment spanning the last 60 years is guaranteed to have suffered downs as well as ups — Mavis’s path has not been unimpeded, especially when she’s tried to go solo. Despite the certainty of Al Bell, her producer in the ’70s at Stax that “Aretha Franklin was no Mavis Staples,” her first albums under her own name were spotty and undercut by business shenanigans. Something similar happened when Prince produced her 1993 release The Voice. But she’s never stopped singing, with albums in the past 20 years tailored for her by Lucky Peterson and Ry Cooder, besides her own production issued by Alligator Records.
Sales success arrived when Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, a Staples’ devotee, produced You Are Not Alone, which earned Mavis a 2011 Grammy, and the 2013 followup One True Vine. Today Mavis Staples has been adopted by musicians of the new Americana. Her message ought to resound as well with activists urging Black Lives Matter.
“Action, action — who’s going to do it if I don’t do it?” she sings on Livin’ On A High Note, backed by casually exacting arrangements propelled by solid if not overpowering rhythms. From childhood Mavis Staples has projected the guileless optimism of a young idealist with the gravitas of a seasoned adult, and today she retains both qualities.  The years have inevitably touched Mavis’ vocal chords, but seldom have any except the greatest blues and soul singers used a rasp or groan so well to express the genuine, urgent conviction we must each ourselves be responsible for what happens around us. Listen to her music and watch Mavis! for a shot of the spirit that can nourish activism and lead to change.