This Best of 2015 list focuses on those revelatory moments, those times when a shard of pristine insight cuts through the clutter of expectation and then memory.
This Mid-Year Best of 2015 list also includes Emerson Lake and Palmer, Gov’t Mule, Jeff Beck, Lead Belly, the Knack and the Staple Singers.
There was no small amount of violence in Blind Willie Johnson’s original take, and that’s boldly recaptured in this unheard version by the Staple Singers.
The Staple Singers’ stirring sense of community comes through in every line of “Friendship” from patriarch Pops Staples’ forthcoming posthumous album.
‘Freedom Highway Complete’ makes viscerally clear that the Staple Singers, though they’d moved far afield of gospel, could still rattle the back pews.
I’ll Take You There, Greg Kot’s new biography of Mavis Staples, explores the life and times of an ebullient contralto and former member of the Staple Singers who’s still belting out R&B and gospel at 74. You May Also Like: Staple Singers, “Jesus is All” from Freedom Highway Complete (2015):Read More
Yesterday, I received a message from an old high school friend. We shared a lot of great times, but one of the greatest was the afternoon we spent at Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, Maine, watching Martin Scorsese’s concert film The Last Waltz. While it’s pretty much impossible to overstateRead More
Checking in with our thoughts on a few of tonight’s winners from the 2011 Grammy Awards, including the Black Keys — the top-rated Something Else! Reviews record from last year — as well as Buddy Guy, Neil Young, Stanley Clarke, Paul McCartney and Mavis Staples, among others. Click through theRead More
Photograph by Spencer Tweedy Over the course of a remarkable career, both with her family band the Staple Singers and as a solo artist, gospel-soul icon Mavis Staples has bravely explored the frustrations, sorrows and then joys of the African-American freedom fight. But, lest we forget, she can still rockRead More
In anybody else’s hands, this new Mavis Staples album would have been a museum piece, interesting but ultimately dust-covered and remote. Not that “We’ll Never Turn Back” (to be issued on Tuesday by Anti- records) doesn’t have plenty of right things to say, and certainly plenty of righteous things, inRead More
