It was the latter half of 1998, and Pops Staples, the patriarch of the Staple Singers, was nearly eighty-four years old. He was unwell, but his voice was still strong. So his daughters decided that he should record another album. Pops, whose given name was Roebuck (he had a brother named Sears), had sung gospel since the thirties, when he was a member of Mississippi’s Golden Trumpets. He’d played blues guitar since he was a kid, and had distinguished himself. “Nothing says amen quite like the sound of Pops strumming a deep, tremolo-heavy open chord,” Guitar World observed a few years ago.
The sessions began at Chicago’s Hinge Recording Studio in October of 1998. They were not always fruitful. Sometimes Pops would have to recline on the studio’s couch. Sometimes he was too weak to play the guitar, an instrument he had once wielded with such confidence. Sometimes he didn’t feel like going at all. Nevertheless, the family—Pops, Cleotha, Yvonne, and Mavis—managed to lay down ten tracks in the course of a year, accompanied on some of them by the studio musicians Tony Grady, on bass, and Tim Austin, on drums. Pops sang lead on nearly every song.
Despite his weakened state, Pops’s voice was gorgeous. But the recording was rough and not ready for release. During the summer of 2000, six months before his death, Pops called his youngest daughter to his sickbed, on the top floor of his duplex. “Mavis,” she recalls him saying with a light voice, “bring the record up here. I want to hear it.” So Mavis went downstairs—there were exactly seven steps from his bedroom to the living room—and fetched a large boom box. She took it to her father, hit play, and left him alone. When she returned, the recording was nearing the end. “Mavis,” he said, “don’t lose this.” “I won’t, Pops,” she replied.
The album, which is titled “Don’t Lose This,” is finally being released next month, more than fifteen years after its inception. It is a mix of blues, gospel, and country, and it's all very religious. The first track, Brenda Burns’s “Somebody Was Watching,” begins with thumping drums and is driven by Pops’s fiery vocals and his daughters’ harmonies (“Somebody was a-watching, somebody was a-watching…”). The second track, Margaret Allison’s “Sweet Home,” is gorgeous simplicity, with just Pops and Mavis on vocals. “Before this time, yeah, another year,” Pops sings, “I may be dead and gone.” The last word was dragged out. The album closes with “Gotta Serve Somebody,” which Bob Dylan wrote in 1979, during his flirtation with Christianity.
The highlight is “Better Home,” a gospel-country hybrid that the Staples first recorded in 1962, for their album “This Land.” Again, Pops and Mavis handle the vocals. “Then I put this old world aside, taking Jesus for my guy. I began to try to walk the narrow way,” they sing. Mavis’s vocal briefly falls away, and Pops continues,
This traditional was, Mavis said, Pops’s favorite song when he was a boy; he was adamant that it be included on the record. It’s not the only track that reaches back into Staples family history. The penultimate song is “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a Christian hymn that Pops taught his daughters in 1950, as they sat around him on the living-room floor. It was the first song they learned as a group, and it quickly became a mainstay of their shows.
Mavis told me that it had initially been difficult for her to listen to the recordings after Pops died. But, eventually, it wasn’t. “As time passed, I could take it and just feel good, just feel like he hasn’t left me,” she said. In recent years, her career had undergone something of a resurgence; in 2011, she won a Grammy for her solo album “You Are Not Alone,” which was produced by Jeff Tweedy, the founder of the band Wilco. Amid her own renewed success, Mavis became increasingly eager to get Pops’s record finished. “I didn’t want to leave this world without getting the record out there,” she said. “I don’t even know if I’m gonna make another record. So I’d better go on and get Pops’s record out here before the world forgets about all of us.”
About a year ago, Mavis’s manager asked Tweedy if he would listen to the recordings and, as Tweedy put it recently, “see if I could resuscitate it.” The first time Tweedy heard the songs, he knew that there was plenty to work with. He never saw the master tapes but, rather, worked off digital files, which were in good shape. “Pops’s original vocals and guitar were easily separated from the rest of the music,” he said. “Once you did that, it almost sounded like a finished record.” What remains of the original sessions are the family’s vocals and, on two tracks, Grady and Austin’s accompaniment. Tweedy added his own guitar playing to the mix, as well as drums, played by his eighteen-year-old son, Spencer; he brought in Scott Ligon to play Wurlitzer piano on “Friendship” and “No News Is Good News.”
The effect of cleaning up Pops’s vocals was revelatory, Tweedy said. There was suddenly an emotion and immediacy that was for him and Spencer, who had previously worked on a Mavis record, “mind-blowing.” As they played along with the tracks, Tweedy said, “it really felt like he was alive with us in the room.” The gaps between takes were filled with Staples family chatter, a bit of which can be heard on the finished record. After they’d sung “Sweet Home,” Pops asked Mavis what she thought. “I think it’s good, Daddy,” she said. “Well, let me hear it then,” he said.
The album was finished last May. Mavis and Yvonne went to the Loft, Wilco’s recording studio, to hear it for the first time. “I couldn’t help but cry,” Mavis said. “I just couldn’t help but cry, you know, because it sounded like Pops was right there in the room with us. Just to hear him singing, and to think back, the memories that each song brought me—how sick he was and how he struggled.” Tweedy was there with his wife and they, too, wept as they watched Mavis sing along with her father’s voice. It pleased Tweedy that, more than once, Mavis could not distinguish between her father’s guitar playing and his own.
Afterward, Mavis told me, “I felt this load had been lifted off me and I’ve done what Pops wanted me to do. And I can move on.”
The album is not only Pops’s last; it is the end of a sixty-five-year run for the Staple Singers. Mavis’s older sister Cleotha died, in 2013, at the age of seventy-eight, after being sick for twelve years and unable to sing on Mavis’s records. “It’s Pops and Cleedi’s last hurrah,” Mavis said. “It is the last Staple Singers.”
