However tomorrow's presidential election turns out, Barack Obama's candidacy is itself a victory. That's what Mavis Staples-- a longtime social justice warrior who marched alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., and soundtracked, with her Staples siblings and father Pops, the civil rights movement-- would likely tell you. Releasing a live album of freedom songs on this election day is a deliberate gesture, but maybe a more nuanced one than people might expect. Staples (like a lot of us), may fervently hope for an Obama win and would probably be the first to enumerate the items remaining on the civil-rights task list, but the gospel/R&B/pop legend has always favored King's peaceful progressive-Christian theology that privileges the "good news" over the agitating, even when good news is scant and there's plenty to agitate about.
Sounding like a charismatic preacher, Staples frames her performance for the audience, "We've come here tonight to bring you some joy, some happiness, inspiration, and some positive vibrations! We want to leave you with enough to last you for maybe the next six months". The crowd that converged on Chicago's cozy, laid-back Hideout this past June are enthused, but polite (and probably a bit awestruck), as she launches with gusto into protest-era standard "Eyes on the Prize". For its well-mannered, highly expectant air, it could be an Obama rally.
Subdued audience aside, Staples-- even at 69-- is a geyser of ferocity and depth. Her voice gets a little grizzly performing "Wade in the Water" in the sub-basement of her (already low) natural range, and she requests crowd participation to bolster her understandably weary pipes on finale "I'll Take You There", but her energy is gobsmacking. Following a raucous rendition of "Freedom Highway", which the three-piece band plays as a runaway bus on a rural road, culminating in much cymbal smashing and jubilant howls, Staples apologizes, "I get so all up into it. You know, when the spirit hits you, you've got to move!"
But Staples is no saint. In contrast to her demure, choir-backed performance on 2007's superlative studio album We'll Never Turn Back, she sounds lusty and provocative over "This Little Light"'s scruffy guitar riffs, veering often in the same phrase between outrage and "joy-- joy, joy, joy!" "Light" and blues moaner "Down in Mississippi" support-- like most great R&B-- he tenet that the sacred and secular, spiritual and carnal aren't mutually exclusive, and that passion is passion whether exercised as faith, anger, love or lust. Considering that these days Staples' fans probably include just as many of the godless as the church-going, her knack for translating religious experience makes her music ecumenical and inclusive unlike, for example, much contemporary Christian rock. That said, probably the most overtly religious number on her setlist, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken", a traditional song closely associated with the Carter Family-- and the first Pops taught his Staples brood to perform-- receives the Hideout audience's warmest embrace.
Throughout the performance, Staples' band and trio of backup singers are ideal support players-- tight, professional, and mostly unobtrusive, never threatening to upstage Staples the way some of Ry Cooder's (admittedly spectacular) Never Turn Back production fireworks do. Of course, Staples has never been one of those velvet roped-off divas. If Live: Hope at the Hideout captures something her studio work doesn't, it's her approachability, her genuine audience rapport. Like all the great politicians, Mavis Staples has a gift for the common touch.
