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Given the Staple Singers’ immeasurable impact on American popular music, it’s surprising a book-length examination of their career wasn’t completed twenty years ago.
Perhaps it’s for the best, because Greg Kot’s I’ll Take You There has the present day advantage of a comprehensive perspective on the family’s career ascendance, brief decline, and Pops and Mavis’s resurgence as soloists and American music icons.
Music critic for the Chicago Tribune, host of the nationally-syndicated rock and roll talk show Sound Opinions, and author of the bestselling book on the alt-rock group Wilco, Kot writes with a journalist’s flair for page-turning prose and an eye for nuance. This sympathetic, accessible book moves with the steady rhythm of Pops Staples’ guitar as it explores the Staples’ history from Pops’ rearing on a Mississippi plantation to the family becoming 1960s and 1970s music superstars, and the struggle to maintain their popularity in the face of changing musical tastes.
Most of Kot’s research comes from extensive interviews with Mavis, Yvonne, and Purvis Staples, and especially with Mavis, who is the central figure of the book. He also had access to Pops’ unpublished memoirs, and interviewed singers, musicians, radio personalities and industry execs who aided the family along their way. All of this gives the reader a fascinating front-row view of the group’s history.
Kot explores the Staples’ tenure as distinctive gospel artists whose down-home sound was created by Pops’s bluesy Mississippi Delta guitar playing, Cleotha’s twangy harmonies, and Mavis’s deep, rich contralto, but the focus is understandably on the family’s 1960s and 1970s message music and commitment to the Civil Rights Movement. At Stax, where the family worked with the legendary Muscle Shoals Swampers, they adroitly bridged the gap between sacred and secular by recording songs of racial uplift that filled dance floors without besmirching the family’s religious roots. Rock-soul-gospel anthems such as “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There” were the soundtrack of the Black Power Movement but, as the family discovered, the songs moved audiences all over the world.
After years of hit making for Vee Jay, Riverside, Epic, and Stax, the Staples plummeted in popularity during the disco era, only to reemerge in the latter part of the twentieth century through commercially and critically acclaimed solo outings by Pops and Mavis. Although Pops and Cleedi have gone from labor to reward, Mavis and Yvonne maintain the family tradition still today.
Like the Staple Singers themselves, I’ll Take You There is honest, down-to-earth, and alternately funny, serious, and heartwarming. Underpinning the story is the maxim that great things can come from the most humble of beginnings. That’s the gospel truth.
