Pops Staples had a marvelous head for music, but he was new to the game of routing tours and scheduling live appearances. One time he drove the family two thousand miles straight out to California from Chicago to play a couple of shows, with no stops in between. “We didn’t know any better,” Mavis says. “But we got to see some great scenery on the way out there. And we learned.”
Eventually, the Staples would base themselves for a week in bigger cities such as Memphis, Jackson, Shreveport, Savannah, and Little Rock, where it was easier to find lodging and play a series of shows in nearby towns.
“Gospel was so big down south they could play towns a hundred miles apart and draw an audience,” Jerry Butler says. “When Curtis [Mayfield] and I were first doing the Impressions, we moved into R&B, and you didn’t have that advantage. Because they were dealing with the Lord, so to speak, they could perform two, three times a day—a morning church service, afternoon worship, and then an evening gospel program.”
A seventeen-year-old DJ named Al Bell began playing “Uncloudy Day” in 1957 on the Sunday-morning gospel program at KOKY in Little Rock and began a lifelong relationship with the Staples family.
“As I started going through gospel music, I came across ‘Uncloudy Day’ and that got my undivided attention,” Bell says. “R. L. Weaver, the gospel jock during the week, was playing it, too, and several other Staple Singers records. He and I started talking about promoting shows and we brought in the Staple Singers for one concert, then brought them back in 1958 and did five dates in Arkansas with Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin, the Swanee Quintet, and Sammie Bryant.”
Bell had the entire family on his Sunday-morning radio show to promote the upcoming concerts. “With some artists it’s not easy to interview or talk to them, but our interview was more like a conversation. Pervis, Pops, Cleotha, and Mavis were all in the studio, and we talked for a while more afterward, too. I thought these are beautiful, sincere, genuine people. There was no uppityness. Many artists onstage and offstage are two different stories in the way they relate to people, but not them. We talked like we knew each other all our lives.”
An imposing six foot four, Bell speaks with the cadence and authority of a preacher. “Rare,” he says of the Staples sound, turning the word into an extended exclamation. “Then and now, I’ve never heard any gospel group that sounds quite like them, harmonized like them, with Pops playing the blues in his gospel way. You talk about rare.”
He is still moved when he recalls how Mavis Staples could inhabit a song. “It affected me in a way I never shall forget,” he says. “We had them in state for a few concerts, the last one in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, at a school auditorium. I made sure to collect the money in time to watch the entire Staple Singers show. Generally speaking, Mavis never sang a song alone, but ‘On My Way to Heaven,’ she did it alone, and she cried as she sang, and pretty soon I was crying, too.
“I asked her what was going through her mind at the time, and she said, ‘We had been on the road a long time, and as I sang I started thinking about my mother, and missing my mother, and realizing that I would perhaps get home soon and see her, and I just started crying.’ Something happened between the two of us that night, a bond occurred that night that I don’t have the words to describe.”
As the family came back on subsequent visits, Bell saw Pops refine the group’s presentation and marketing. “I would watch how he would set shows up, very organized to the letter,” Bell says. “He would have them perform so many songs, make sure he got the audience to a certain point of emotional investment. He wanted to make sure the audience felt what they were about. Then they would take a break just as things were peaking, and not a moment later. There would be an intermission, then they would play their latest album over the PA, and the girls and Pervis would take the albums out to the audience and he would be onstage asking people to buy them, or take a picture with the family. He did it in such a way that you didn’t feel offended. It was very casual and good-natured. ‘You see my son, Pervis, over there? He’s a good-looking fella. Why don’t you take a picture with him?’ Then they’d get back onstage, and they were back into it. He was just masterful at keeping that vibe, pushing out this powerful, moving music, but selling it, too.”
Pops, the all-business businessman, got along well with Bell. “I never saw the gun,” Bell says with a laugh, “and fortunately never had to encounter anything like that with him. When I was paying Pops, he said, ‘Young man, you’re a good businessman. This is the first time I ever made $1,000 in one night. You can book me anytime.’ C. L. Franklin said the same thing. One thing about Pops, he was an expert at human relations. You were crystal clear on what was going on in his mind and what he would take and not take. He was as soulful in his communication as he was singing and playing that guitar.”
The Staples were getting plenty of airplay on WDIA in Memphis as well. The station, which hit the airwaves in the 1940s, had become a fifty-thousand-watt African-American tastemaker that had launched the careers of Rufus Thomas and B. B. King, among others. Each Christmas, the station staged a Goodwill Revue charity concert that brought a who’s who of gospel, blues, R&B, and soul to town. In 1957, the Staples performed on a Goodwill bill that included a young Memphis gospel group, the Dixie Nightingales, with sixteen-year-old David Ruffin, future vocalist in the Temptations.
“He was a little skinny guy—even I was taller than him,” Mavis recalls of watching Ruffin perform at Mason Temple, a Pentecostal church with more than thirty-five hundred celebrating fans in attendance. “But he sang with so much feeling, he’d go all through you. You’d just have to sit there and hold yourself to keep from exploding. Cleedi couldn’t keep herself from shouting, she just had to let herself go. But I’d fight it. You see, he was bad.”
Ruffin’s cool was pierced by Rufus Thomas, ever the practical joker. “Rufus jumped down off the stage into the audience with this can, opened up the can right in David’s face, and out popped a three-foot [fake] green snake, and David’s eyes got as big as . . . he thought it was a real snake!” Mavis says. “He shot down the aisle. He eventually came back to his seat still shaking.”
While the Staples performed, three leather-jacketed figures appeared in the wings just offstage. Mavis noticed them because they happened to be just about the only white guys in the room, and they were carrying motorcycle helmets. After she got offstage, one of the bikers struck up a conversation.
“He told me his name but it didn’t register,” Mavis says. “He knew our music real well, though, and he told me he loved the way Pops played his guitar. ‘I like the way your daddy plays that nervous guitar.’ David Ruffin comes up to me afterward and is all excited. ‘Do you know who that was?’ I just shook my head. ‘That’s the guy who sings “Blue Suede Shoes”!’ ”