Guest Blog: Greg Kot on I’ll Take You There

Greg Kot is the author of the 2017-2018 One Book, One Chicago selection, I'll Take You There. We asked Greg to reflect on what inspired him to write the book in this guest blog.

AM pop radio of the ‘70s introduced me to Mavis Staples and the Staple Singers. Their deep harmony vocals, full of ancient mystery that only a family group could conjure, mesmerized 14-year-old me. And yet their songs were as direct as a news bulletin: “Respect Yourself,” “If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me),” “I’ll Take You There.”

A few years later while in college, I caught a midnight showing of a then-new movie, The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s documentary of The Band’s farewell concert. Up until then, I had only seen images of the Staple Singers smiling from album covers with their ‘70s Afros and hip clothes. So Scorsese’s camera provided an introduction of sorts as it slowly panned the room while the Staples merged their voices with the Band’s. Sisters Mavis, Cleotha and Yvonne projected a serene joy as they sang with their father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, and traded verses with the Band. Their voices melded and then flew free, Mavis bringing it home with a fervor that made everything else in the movie recede. As the song fades, Mavis offers a blessing. “Beautiful,” she says.

I was hooked after that and began digging into the group’s history. As potent as the ‘70s AM radio hits were, they sounded slick next to unadorned classics from the ‘50s and early ‘60s such as “Uncloudy Day,” “Too Close” and “On My Way to Heaven.” The group’s early music is haunting, downright spooky, like the mist rolling off a cotton field at midnight. It was performed with little more than a guitar and four voices. Cleotha’s down-sloping soprano floats atop the mix and Mavis’ robust contralto roams up from the bottom while Pops’ guitar plays the blues as taught to him by Charley Patton. No wonder that artists across the generations like Bob Dylan, John Fogerty, Aretha Franklin, Prince and Neko Case have been enthralled by it.

When I became the music critic at the Chicago Tribune in 1990, the Staples no longer had a record deal, but they would occasionally perform in their hometown, sometimes as an opening act for artists of lesser stature. It wasn’t until after Pops died in 2000 and Mavis reinvented herself as a solo artist in 2004, self-financing the recording sessions, that the Staples' music slowly re-emerged into a public view.

I was fortunate to interview Mavis and her family a number of times over those years, and had dreamed of writing a book about them and their remarkable rise: sharecropper’s kids singing timeless songs in Southside churches that eventually became gospel hits; providing a soundtrack for the civil rights movement while serving as Martin Luther King’s chosen singing group; championing the music of Bob Dylan before anyone outside the folk movement did; walking away with a movie ostensibly about the Band, and on and on.

Yet when I first pitched the idea more than a decade ago, publishers weren’t interested in a book on the Staples. That changed when artists like Ry Cooder and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy began working with Mavis, and she started appearing on national TV talk shows, her talent and charisma reviving a conversation about her family that felt increasingly timely. She was no longer perceived as a has-been but as an all-time great enjoying a victory lap fired not just by decades-old hits, but by of-the-moment songs that spoke to the times we live in. “You Are Not Alone” felt as necessary in 2010 as “Freedom Highway” had in 1965.

A Staple Singers biography presented a daunting task, with multiple storylines. But here’s the most important one: Implicit in every word that Mavis and her family sang since the ’40s is that black lives not only matter, they are essential to the idea of America as an idea and an ideal. It’s a voice that says to all of us, “I’ll take you there,” no matter what gets in the way.