The Healing Power of Delight: Mavis Staples
Last night, I was fortunate enough to see Mavis Staples perform at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor.
If you don’t know who Mavis Staples is, you have been deprived. Just a few lines from her website’s biography give you a sense of the scope and impact of her career:
“She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., performed at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, and sang in Barack Obama’s White House. She’s collaborated with everyone from Prince and Bob Dylan to Arcade Fire and Hozier, blown away countless festivalgoers from Newport Folk and Glastonbury to Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, performed with The Band at The Last Waltz, and graced the airwaves on Fallon, Colbert, Ellen, Austin City Limits, Jools Holland, the GRAMMYs, and more.”
The biography doesn’t mention her personal relationship with Bob Dylan, but she tells some great stories about it that you will not regret listening to.
In an era where the phrase “living legend” is arguably overused, Mavis is without doubt a living legend. She has been singing for 71 years, starting off as a child in the family gospel and soul group her father, Pops Staples, founded in the mid-20th century. She shows no signs of stopping — her voice has gotten deeper and raspier over the years, but this only adds to its richness and power. Now 80, she put out not one but two albums last year — a live album in February and a studio album, We Get By (produced and written by Ben Harper), in May.
Despite all her successes, though, Mavis has faced challenges in her life. She told NPR a horrifying story of a racist run-in at a Memphis gas station in 1964, being pulled over by police armed with dogs and shotguns, and the arrest of the whole family (who were then let go after someone recognized them at the station). She’s had a difficult time seeing the same kind of hate resurface during the era of Donald Trump, as well — in 2017 she told Elon Green of the New Yorker:
We’ve gone all the way back to the fifties and the sixties. This is the President of the United States! He’s supposed to bring joy and light and love to the world. It’s all backwards, it’s backwards.
On top of this, over the last two decades, she’s lost all but one of the family members who made up the Staples Singers — Pops, in 2000; sister Cleotha, in 2013; and sister Yvonne, in 2018. She told Rolling Stone in February 2019:
Sometimes I really feel isolated. My entire family is gone on to glory. I still have my brother [Pervis] — I can’t believe that everybody else is gone. I know that they’re in a better place. I know that they’re resting. They’re at peace, and I know that I’ll never forget what my father taught me and my mother taught me, to love one another. Love your neighbor. I’m just carrying on. I’m just trying to stay strong. I really get lonely at times, and I think about my last sister that left, Yvonne. I think about the fun we had and I can smile. I can get a little chuckle, but I miss everybody. I miss my father and my family. I miss my family, but I do have people around me that I feel that love me, and I’m safe. I’m alright.
It’s this sentiment that shines through in everything Mavis says, and sings — the balance between grief and happiness. It’s clearly a part of her make-up to not just carry on, but thrive, and share the joy she both has found and continues to find in life. We Get By shares many positive messages, all of which are sorely needed in 2019 —in the title track (“We get by on love and faith / We get by with a smile on our face / We get by with help from our kin / We get by through thick and through thin”), in “Change” (“X is the letter / blue is the color / one is the number / Now is the time / Gonna change around here”), in “Anytime” (“I’m a fighter, I’m a lover / there is no other way”), in “Brothers and Sisters” (“We’ve come too far to be lost / So many bridges yet to cross / I’m waiting on you like a message from God”).
This focus on positivity in the face of challenge, and her ability to share that light with others, is what makes Mavis so special. Paste Magazine called her one of the top 20 live acts of the 2010s, and noted that “she just draws all the love and goodness from your subconscious until it overwhelms every anxious thought or negative feeling.”
But this is Mavis’s goal. The “about” page on her website ends with this:
“I sing because I want to leave people feeling better than I found them,” Staples concludes. “I want them to walk away with a positive message in their hearts, feeling stronger than they felt before. I’m singing to myself for those same reasons, too.”
She told the audience last night at the Michigan Theater something similar — that she hoped she would get us feeling good. She paused, then said with a smile, “I don’t know how long that will last,” and paused again, as waves of laughter grew within the crowd, and Mavis laughed along with us. “We’ll try to keep you feeling good while you’re here with us, at least,” she finally added, chuckling.
And get us feeling good she did. She focused on more upbeat songs, and interspersed them with stories about the local family she had at the show (many and various), her feelings on today’s politics (“I want to go to that White House, grab that guy by that lonnng red tie, and — ,” she said, breaking off to mime reeling a tie downward to Mavis height, followed by vigorous air slaps back and forth), her gratitude that the concert raised over $20,000 for the Breakfast at St. Andrews (“I’m gonna have to go down there one of these days and serve some breakfast”), and even, in an utterly unoffensive and in fact wildly charming way, the items available at the merch table (“We’ve got… we’ve got…,” she started falteringly, then turned to her band members — “What’s that called?” “Box set?” one of them suggested, and Mavis crowed “Box set! That’s it!” When the audience laughed, Mavis laughed as well, and said, fake-indignant, “Hey, I’m in my 80s now!”).
Outside her native charm and joie de vivre, Mavis knows how to work a crowd. The Michigan Theater’s 1600 seats appeared to be mostly full, a mix of folks including prototypical Ann Arbor aging hippies, University of Michigan students, and many others. Mavis had us smiling, laughing, responding, clapping, and singing, and on our feet a number of times. When she sang “Touch a Hand, Make a Friend,” she came to the edge of the stage and leaned down to shake hands with the audience in the front row, one person after another.
I was in the second row, stage left, and there was no one in the row ahead of me. When Mavis got to the end of the center section, she looked right at me and held out her hand. The invitation was undeniable. I jumped out of my seat, walked up to her, and shook her hand. I think all I was able to say was, “thank you, ma’am,” which reflected what I felt — intense gratitude to this woman for bringing a bit of joy back into my life.
I’ve had a few tough years, and I still struggle to find the joie de vivre that I once had. Seeing Mavis was bittersweet for intensely personal reasons, and I spent a lot of the concert with tears in my eyes. But for the first time in a while, the tears weren’t all tears of sadness, and I was laughing and clapping and singing as heartily as anyone in that auditorium.
Something that becomes more and more clear to me as I grow older is how fragile we human beings are, and how many of us are shouldering deep traumas that affect huge swaths of our lives. This is the power of Mavis Staples: She is not just a musician, and her music is not just music — she is a healer and her music has the power to console. And for that, we should all be grateful.
