The whole world is wonderin’, what’s wrong with the United States. Those words were sung by The Staple Singers on Freedom Highway, a recording made in Chicago’s New Nazareth Church in April of 1965. It was a pivotal time for the country and the group.
At first glance it seemed the country was doing fine; Lyndon Johnson had proclaimed his “Great Society” in January, movie-goers flocked to see Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins sing the song of the year, Chim Chim Cher-ee, while The Sound of Music hit Broadway. But all was not well in the United States. The Viet Nam War had gotten into full swing early in the year and protests were already starting. Racial tensions were high; just a month earlier Martin Luther King, after much turmoil and several brutal murders, led his four-day march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama.
The Staple Singers had been a fairly successful gospel group for about ten years but with this new recording they moved in a different direction - that of the “message song”, designed to push for change beyond just getting more people into the church.
The family group was founded in Chicago in 1948 by Roebuck “Pops” Staples. He had lived in Chicago with his wife Oceola for thirteen years but Pops had grown up on a Mississippi plantation. He had learned guitar by playing with blues legends Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson and Son House but he was always drawn to the church.
In Chicago he worked the steel mills and sung with a group called the Trumpet Jubilees but once he had a family he recruited his oldest children, Cleotha, Pervis and Mavis to play local churches. They were all talented singers but Mavis, even though she was the youngest, had such a remarkable voice she sang bass.
They made their first record in 1952 for a small, private label then later recorded for United Records of Chicago. Their first records could only be described as “haunting”, harkening back to backwoods, country churches, but they were also crude sounding and didn’t really catch on.
In 1956 they joined the larger Vee-Jay label and made a major adjustment in their sound.
The guitar was only starting to be accepted in the very traditional gospel field, it was usually acoustic and always played as background accompaniment. Pops brought his electric guitar up front, making it the dominant voice but the group kept singing those haunting, country sounding harmonies. The sound was unique; both progressive and traditional at the same time.
One record, Uncloudy Day was a gospel hit which wasn’t played on the mainstream media it did catch the attention of music geeks like a very young Bob Dylan (still Robert Zimmerman at the time) who later described it as “the most mysterious thing I’d ever heard”. He cites it as a prime influence and there is a recording of him singing it with the Staple Singers in 1961.
Despite their success they were looking for more so left Vee-Jay to sign first with Checker Records then with Riverside, hoping to reach a new, secular (and white) audience that thought of gospel as folk music. That didn’t work so in 1965 they signed with Epic and resolutely moved away from strictly gospel.
That wasn’t an easy decision; their core fans, the church-goers who had made them successful, were intolerant. You either sang for the Lord or the Devil, not both. However Pops Staples had met and befriended Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and wanted to be a part of his non-violent fight for equality.
Theoretically that’s not such a big change; the black church had always been a force for social justice since slavery days, it was a logical progression. However the church audiences saw it as selling out and a few years later when they played a gospel show at a church in Philadelphia they got a cold reception, there was no going back.
Besides Freedom Highway (which was an album track, not a hit) they recorded Why Am I Treated So Bad? and Buffalo Springfield’s for What It’s Worth. Both were minor hits in the R&B and pop charts but they put the Staple Singers in the mainstream. Still they were frustrated that others were making more money with their sound than they were; Aretha Franklin’s Chain of Fools was a smash hit that sounded exactly like a Staple Singers record.
In 1968 they moved on to Stax Records, the hottest southern soul label. Of course soul is based on gospel so they were right at home. Working with greats like Steve Cropper and Booker T Jones they continued with their message songs such as Long Walk to D.C., about Martin Luther King’s march and I’ll Take You There (which borrowed a lot from a Jamaican reggae song called Liquidator) but their biggest hit was Respect Yourself, a brilliant song that still resonates.
They were now major stars but unfortunately had joined Stax when it was in decline; it went bankrupt in 1975 so the group next signed with Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom Records.
It was a perfect match. Curtis Mayfield’s father, Percy Mayfield, pretty well invented the message song. He had a huge and enduring hit in 1950 with Please Send Me Someone to Love. From the title, and verse, you’d think it was a song about yearning for love, which it was but it was also a prayer for universal love, peace and understanding, not a usual theme for an R&B song in the 1950s
Mayfield the elder went on to write hits for Ray Charles (as his staff writer), Mayfield the younger established himself as a fine singer with the Impressions then as an artist with gospel-based message songs like People Get Ready and Amen, though he probably got better pay cheques from his hit Freddie’s Dead, an anti-drug song.
The Staples/Mayfield combination should have worked, and in a way it did. Their song Let’s Do It Again was a No. 1 hit, but hardly conformed to either gospel or message song requirements.
The group drifted from label to label with some minor successes commercially, and they continued to experiment and push the boundaries. They sang The Weight with The Band at The Last Waltz concert and did versions of rock songs like Talking Heads Slippery People and performed with country star Marty Stuart.
Pops had always been reluctant to play the new stuff and in the 1980s and 90s their live shows were pretty well all gospel, though they didn’t play churches. The group disbanded in 1994, Pops had a solo career playing blues festivals (though he refused to play blues) and Mavis became a star in her own right, highly respected by the top names in the pop and rock fields. Pops died in 2000, sister Cleotha died in 2013 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s but Mavis continues to perform to much acclaim.
Today, with the U.S. suffering from another bout of racial tension and low self-esteem, with the whole world wondering what’s wrong, they could use some more inspirational message songs just like in 1965.