The Staple Singers became free agents at a time when black music was flourishing on the South Side, with gospel, blues, and doo-wop on the ascent and soul rumbling to life. Pops and the family were coveted by the largest black-owned record company in the country, Vee-Jay, the core of Chicago’s “Record Row” on South Michigan Avenue along with Chess Records. The label, which opened in 1953, was run by Vivian Carter and Jimmy Bracken, husband-and-wife R&B and gospel connoisseurs. Bracken had initially approached Pops about recording for Vee-Jay shortly after establishing the label in 1953, but the Staples had already struck their deal with United.
“Jimmy told us to come and see him when the contract expired with United,” Pops recalled, but he was in no hurry to make a deal with another label, given the dispiriting experience at United. Instead he went back to his factory job and borrowed some books from the library about the music business. After six months of studying, he touched base with Bracken again, and the label owner assured Pops that he wanted to cut gospel records with the Staple Singers.
Carter and Bracken were black cultural evangelists, part of a flourishing network of South Side labels, clubs, newspapers, barbershops, banks, and saloons that catered to the African-American community. By the time the Staples joined, the label had already broken through with Jimmy Reed, the Spaniels, John Lee Hooker, and Pervis Staples’s old battle-of-the-bands rival, the Highway Q.C.’s, led by Johnnie Taylor.
Yet at first, it was more of the same. The initial Vee-Jay session in November 1955 produced three tracks. The Staples had been performing “If I could Hear My Mother Pray Again” since their very first live appearance in the late ’40s, and it featured some of the key elements in their sound: Pops’s skeletal, shimmering guitar chords and group harmonies underpinning his twangy vocal with a brief leap into falsetto, finally resolving in a long, downward swoop. The sixteen-year-old Mavis’s vibrato-tinged contralto anchored “God’s Wonderful Love” and “Calling Me.” The songs went nowhere commercially, and Pops again expected to get axed. But Bracken promised him a second chance.
“I asked the man at Vee-Jay when we signed the contract, ‘What would you be happy with? How many would you be happy selling?’ ” Pops told Goldmine in 1996. “And he said, ‘If it makes a thousand, I’ll be happy.’ I think we sold about 200. So after about two, three months I went back and said, ‘I guess we’ll let it go since we ain’t come up near to your expectations.’ And he said, ‘You let me be the judge. Now when you ready to go back in again?’ ”
The label’s brilliant talent scout, A&R man Ewart Abner, in particular sensed something that United Records had not. He encouraged the Staples to stay the course, to hew to its “down-home” approach instead of trying to keep up with trends by adding heavier rhythmic accents or making a sharp turn toward a more easily marketed dance-oriented sound.
The family reentered Universal Recording studio on the near North Side on September 11, 1956. As was typical of Vee-Jay recording sessions, the Staples split time with two other acts on the label, organist Maceo Woods and the doo-wop group the Spaniels. A drummer, Paul Gusman, also was on hand, but the focus remained on the family’s voices and Pops’s guitar.
The session began inauspiciously. Mavis was feeling ill and sat through the three hours in the studio to conserve energy as she sang. But she sounds in superb voice, nonetheless. Pops takes the lead on his “I Know I Got Religion,” turning the invocation “dipped in the water” into an incantatory call-and-response with his children. He lays down a percussive guitar line on “Swing Down, Chariot (Let Me Ride),” with brushed drums pushing the brisk tempo.
“Uncloudy Day” trumps them all. The Staples had rearranged the traditional hymn to suit their strengths and had been performing it for nearly a decade. The song was known to almost anyone who had attended a Christian church service. It was written in 1879 by Josiah K. Alwood, an itinerant preacher from the Midwest, after riding through a midnight rainstorm and catching a glimpse of what he said was a rainbow. The vision prompted a reverie about the afterlife: “O they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise / O they tell me of an unclouded day.”
It has remained in the gospel repertoire ever since, recorded and performed by countless artists, ranging from gospel royalty to pop and country performers including the Eagles’ Don Henley and Willie Nelson. Johnny Cash said it was the first song he ever performed in public, at the age of twelve in 1944 while growing up in Arkansas. Most versions have a stately, quaint feel.
In the Staples’ telling, the song enters like a mirage or a hallucination, evoking a cotton field on a summer afternoon. Each guitar note seems to wobble in the heat as the group harmonizes on the first verse. Halfway through the song, Mavis enters, her voice in its lowest register: “Well, well, well . . .” A call to attention, not unlike something John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters might say before starting to strut. But Mavis is talking about a different place, a glimpse from a dream. She stretches out the first verse for a minute and a half; the chorus meditates on the words, “They tell me,” in the manner of a preacher who returns to the same phrase over and over again for rhythmic emphasis. Mavis lets her voice sail, enraptured by “a home far away.” The song couldn’t be simpler or more stark, yet it carries weight: the dark gravity of Mavis’s voice, the heavy drapery of Pops’s guitar. It’s a masterpiece of concision, and yet it feels wide-open, a vast space that included the long-ago South and the wished-upon afterlife.
“Three groups went down at once and, believe it or not, we cut our record before twelve o’clock that night,” Pops said. “And those boys, the Spaniels, were blasting away playing back from the speakers and our little record seemed so weak and pitiful. I said, ‘Well, we ain’t doing nothing with this.’ They released all of them at the same time and . . . our record it took off like a greyhound running!” [laughs]
The record was a huge hit, especially by gospel standards. Precise numbers were impossible to ascertain given the impenetrable maze of record-company accounting in that era, but estimates range from tens of thousands to as many as a million. With Vee-Jay’s name behind it, “Uncloudy Day” got pushed at radio stations around the country and enabled the Staple Singers to tour nationally for the first time.
“They were with the premier black label of the ’50s,” says gospel journalist Bill Carpenter. “If anyone was going to put out your record to the black market and do it service, that was the one. And ‘Uncloudy Day’ in particular really captured the moment. It reminded a lot of people of home, those people who had migrated from the South after World War II to work in Chicago, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana. Those bluesy chords reminded people of the South the way Motown reminds baby boomers of their teenage years. The song had been around for a while, but to give it that down-home, bluesy feel was all Pops’s doing. Most gospel during that time wasn’t like that.”
Pops was merely doing what came naturally. “That sound came from 90, 100 years ago,” he told Goldmine in 1996. “My grandfather lived to be over 100 years old and I saw him before he passed—that was the kind of song that he used to sing.”
“Daddy’s daddy [Warren Staples] used to sing these songs to me,” Mavis recalled. “It’s the same sound Grandpa was singing, and Pops passed it down to us. . . . When ‘Uncloudy Day’ came out, they thought we were old people singing that kind of down-home stuff.”
With a hit record raising their profile and boosting their credibility, the Staples found themselves transformed from a novelty to hometown stars who still carried themselves like everybody’s next-door neighbor.
“The first time I saw them was Greater Mount Sinai Baptist Church on the West Side in the mid-’50s, and the girls were in white dresses, no lipstick, a little powder—they looked like angels and they sounded like angels,” Jerry Butler says. “I was about fifteen, and Mavis was in the same range. They were in attendance and they were called up by the minister to sing. By then, ‘Uncloudy Day’ was on the radio; it wasn’t R&B, it wasn’t spiritual, it was the Staples being themselves. And the response when people heard Mavis’s voice was ecstatic: ‘Bless you, child,’ ‘Yes, Lord!’ People were out of their seats. It was the full coat of armor.”
As with everything he did, Pops proceeded with careful deliberation. The group’s live performances were gimmick-free. “He made sure the family was never under-rehearsed, underprepared, underdressed,” Butler says. “Their show was not about a whole lot of dancing or twisting. There was clapping of hands, stomping of feet, Pops’s guitar—that was their show. And it worked because of the feeling they put into it.”
The family members were already seasoned entertainers. “By the time we got out of high school, I’d been to Atlanta; Jackson, Mississippi; North Carolina; all over the South,” Mavis says. “We’d go out on the weekends, start back home at 3 p.m. Sunday after our afternoon program, and not get home till Monday. So I’d do my homework and get back to school Tuesday.”
When “Uncloudy Day” took off, the tours got longer and the money got better. After one weekend and two shows down south—a Friday carnival in Jackson and a Saturday-night gospel program in New Orleans—Pops came home with nearly $800 in his pocket.
“I had to make a career choice,” Pops said with a laugh. “I was making $65 a week at the steel mill in Gary, and I felt I couldn’t afford to quit. But we got down to Jackson, and the Masonic Temple was packed. We tore the house down in New Orleans, I could hardly get in the place. They gave us $300, plus a $50 bonus. When we got home, I told my wife I made more in a weekend than in a month on the job in the steel mill. She said, ‘Pop, it’s time to go sing with your family.’ ”