Like Pop Staples, Sam Cooke was stunned upon first hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Though it was not explicitly about civil rights, the song resonated with many African Americans: “How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man?” They were outcasts in their own country, and a white kid from the Midwest sang like he knew exactly what that meant and how it felt. In response, Cooke wrote and recorded “A Change Is Gonna Come.” It captured the frustration so many African Americans felt as they struggled to stand as equals among their fellow citizens. The song’s narrator pleads with his “brother” for help, “But he winds up knockin’ me back down to my knees.”
Cooke had never been quite so emotionally transparent in his recordings as a solo pop performer, and he sang like the redemption the Soul Stirrers had so ardently pursued was slipping from his grasp. The singer wrestled with misgivings about what the song could mean for his career, however, potentially costing him the audience he had worked so hard to cultivate. Its outspokenness, a departure from the genial party and love songs that had made him a fixture in the Top 40 since 1957, filled him with pride but also made him uneasy. Nonetheless, he prepared the song for release near the end of 1964.
A few days after Cooke’s death, “A Change Is Gonna Come” was finally released as a B-side to his single “Shake.” The song became a hit in its own right, ascending into the Top 40 and joining a chorus of topical songs bubbling up from the front lines of the African-American musical community.
For decades, the church was the voice of black protest, both from the preacher’s pulpit and the choir box, where the hymns and spirituals said what many African Americans felt and experienced in their everyday lives but could not necessarily express out loud in a world where they were still largely treated as servants and laborers. In Chicago, the music and the message were deeply intertwined; one of the city’s most storied ministers, Reverend Clay Evans, would sing his sermons with shattering power. It was a message that did not carry far beyond the South Side and other black ghettos or rural communities, though; whites never ventured there and the mainstream media ignored or dismissed it. But now that voice was filtering into music that had a platform outside the black community; R&B, blues, soul, and jazz artists were articulating what it meant to be oppressed. Social consciousness became part of the vocabulary of popular music.
Curtis Mayfield, who had sought out Pops Staples’s advice when his group the Impressions was first signed to Vee-Jay in the late ’50s, led the way. The Impressions’ “Keep on Pushing” (Top 10 hit in 1964) and “People Get Ready” (Top 20 in 1965) became synonymous with the movement.
“We were young and didn’t know these songs would have that effect,” says Fred Cash, who joined the Impressions in the ’50s and has carried on their legacy ever since. “You realize that songs like ‘Keep on Pushing,’ ‘We’re a Winner,’ and ‘Choice of Colors’ inspired people. I was talking to Andy Young [civil rights activist and former congressman] and he told me how they would sing ‘Amen’ and ‘Keep on Pushing’ during the freedom marches. It gave them inspiration to keep on doing what they were doing.”
Some artists spoke in thinly veiled code: Little Milton’s 1965 blues hit, “We’re Gonna Make It,” can be read as a relationship song, but it also addresses the aspirations of the black community. Some spoke as bluntly as a brick thrown through a window: Charles Mingus’s 1960 screed “Fables of Faubus” railed against Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who had called out the National Guard to prevent black students from integrating a Little Rock Central High School. There was John Coltrane’s moving “Alabama,” an evocative tone poem about the 1963 bombing of an Alabama church in which four black girls were killed, and “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” the 1960 jazz masterpiece in which Max Roach, Oscar Brown Jr., and Abbey Lincoln combined activism and musical improvisation.
“History has never known a protest movement so rich in song as the civil rights movement,” Newsweek declared in 1964. “Nor a movement in which songs are as important. Martin Luther King called them ‘vital.’ . . . At nightly get-out-the-vote meetings singing always came first, the singers gilded with sweat starting off with ‘We’ve been ‘buked and we’ve been scorned . . . but we’ll never turn back.’ ”
The Staple Singers had recorded their own version of “I’ve Been Scorned,” released as a single by Vee-Jay in 1961. As the violence and angry rhetoric rose around the civil rights struggle, the traditional gospel song and its Apocalyptic imagery sounded chillingly of the moment. “Two white horses running side by side / Me and my Lord / Gonna take that ride,” Pops Staples sang with withering certitude.
In 1965, the group brought the song to Carnegie Hall, as part of the first New York Folk Festival. “When the Staple Singers performed, I got to experience the real meaning of a standing ovation,” promoter Herb Gart recalled in an interview on the Berkshire Fine Arts website. “They were doing a steamy ballad called ‘White Horses’ [referring to “I’ve Been Scorned”]. The Staple Singers were so intense that in the middle of the song the audience stood up and stayed standing the rest of the song. They stood up not to say, ‘Bravo!’ but because they couldn’t stay seated. It was an incredible experience.”
After Riverside’s demise, Pops moved the Staple Singers to Epic Records, a subsidiary of CBS, which already had Dylan under contract at Columbia Records. Epic paired the Staples with in-house producer Billy Sherrill, whose lush productions and deft songwriting skills would eventually score huge hits for country artists such as Tammy Wynette (“Stand by Your Man”), George Jones (“The Grand Tour”), and Charlie Rich (“The Most Beautiful Girl”).
But Sherrill’s background as a Southern blues musician was his primary credential when he began working with the Staple Singers on their Epic debut, Amen, released in 1965. It’s essentially a continuation of their Riverside albums, with slightly more elaborate production. The set reprises songs from their years at Riverside (“More than a Hammer and Nail”) and Vee-Jay (“Nobody’s Fault but Mine”). Pops’s storytelling skills come to the fore on the biblical tale of lust and vengeance “Samson and Delilah,” with its defiant proclamation: “If I had my way, if I had my way, if I had my way, I’d tear this building down.” Pervis plunges deep into the melodrama of “Be Careful of Stones That You Throw,” a spoken-word morality tale originally sung by Hank Williams. Pervis gives an ultradry reading, impersonating a finger-wagging preacher: “Gossip is cheap, and it’s low,” he intones, drawing out the silences between words like a thespian. “So unless you’ve made no mistakes in your life, just be careful of the stones that you throw.”
With the next album, the Staples put their first major musical imprint on the civil rights movement. Pops was an avid news watcher and reader. “If you want to write songs for us,” he said at one point, “just read the headlines.” He and the Staples were on the road as they watched images of Martin Luther King’s series of protest marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The first, on March 7, 1965, arose in response to the slaying of civil rights worker Jimmie Lee Jackson at a protest in Marion, Alabama, a week earlier. As the six hundred marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, they were attacked by police, armed with clubs, dogs, and tear gas. The “Bloody Sunday” carnage stirred nationwide outrage; one of the freedom march leaders, future congressman John Lewis, suffered a fractured skull.
“The things we did were mostly inside with Dr. King,” Pervis Staples says. “We didn’t do too many marches because we were touring so much. But we were paying attention to the movement, and we all saw what happened on that long walk from Selma. When they got to that bridge, and the white folks had taken some big ol’ nuts off the tractors and put them on sticks and they were hitting that bridge. Then the horses came and people were running and screaming. That was something we never forgot. It hit Pops hard.”
A five-day march from Selma brought twenty-five thousand protesters to the capitol steps in Montgomery on March 25, where King spoke. “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience,” he said. “And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
That tumultuous month sent Pops Staples to his guitar, crafting the chords, melody, and lyrics for one of the era’s most profound songs: “Freedom Highway.”
The next month, the group would debut the song at New Nazareth Church on Chicago’s South Side, and Sherrill flew in to record the concert. Pops advised the producer to go straight to his hotel from the airport, and then had him picked up and delivered to the church. “Pops Staples was a cool guy,” Sherrill told Mix magazine. “He said, ‘You’re not riding around Chicago by yourself.’ ”
Sherrill may have been out of place, a white man on 79th Street in the heart of Chicago’s African-American community as civil rights tensions were escalating, but he did a splendid job of documenting what transpired when the Staples performed at New Nazareth. Freedom Highway is not only one of the finest Staple Singers releases, it’s one of the best live albums ever made.
It opens with Pops introducing one of the first public performances of the title song: “And from that march, word was revealed, a song was composed.” A clarion Pops guitar riff rings out, and the family and the congregation begin to clap the rhythm. From the get-go, it’s apparent that the Staples have become a ferocious funk-blues group with drummer Al Duncan and bassist Phil Upchurch pushing the tempo. Then Mavis, singing Pops’s words, lays down the law. “Marching on the freedom highway . . . I made up my mind, and I won’t turn around,” she sings in a tone that declares anyone who tries to stop her had best step out of the way.
Pops packs a handful of lines with philosophy, history, biblical allusions, rage, resentment, and resolve. In one verse, he references the 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was beaten, shot, and thrown in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi after flirting with a white woman. Till’s body was returned to Chicago, and his funeral was held at Roberts Temple Church of God, only a few blocks from the Staples’ apartment at the time. Till’s casket was left open at the family’s request, and photos of his badly disfigured face shocked the nation. “Found dead people in the forest, Tallahatchie River and lakes,” Mavis sings. “The whole wide world is wonderin’ what’s wrong with the United States.”
In “What You Gonna Do,” with its spooky riff and Judgment Day paranoia, the Staples warn their people’s oppressors: In the end, there will be no place for anyone to hide from his misdeeds. It flows into a staggering version of Thomas Dorsey’s “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” a gospel landmark that had previously been recorded by Mavis’s idol, Mahalia Jackson, and her friend Aretha Franklin. Mavis’s wrenching performance is underlined by Duncan’s sensitive, almost orchestral drumming. He makes his trap kit rumble, as if the heavens are answering Mavis when she sings, “O Jesus, lead me on.”
“Help Me, Jesus” throws Pops into a reverie about growing up in Mississippi and the revival meetings at the ramshackle wooden church near his home. “Some of those sisters began to moan . . . and I saw my soul has got that moan. He keep on praying, and she keep on moaning . . . My soul has got to moooooan.” The performance escalates into a frenzy of double-time clapping, Upchurch’s bass rising and then receding in the mix, the music going on and on as the audience audibly comes unhinged.
“We Shall Overcome,” by now the theme song of the civil rights movement, doesn’t move quite like the songs that came before. It’s drained of surprise, but it doesn’t matter. Everybody in the church recognizes the song’s import, and they’re shouting the words. One member of the congregation simply screams “Yeah!” over and over again. The song may be almost a cliché by now, but to the congregation it has become something much bigger than a song. It’s a symbol.
Things briefly wind down after an ebullient “When the Saints Go Marching In,” with Pervis doing another dramatic reading of yet another Hank Williams country tearjerker, “The Funeral.” Then it’s back for the one-two-three punch of “Build on That Shore,” “Tell Heaven,” and “He’s All Right,” on which Mavis improvises in classic gospel fashion—“worrying” lines and stretching words, breaking into wordless exultations—while Pops, Upchurch, and Duncan fire away like a blues power trio. “Play it, boy!” somebody screams as Upchurch briefly takes the wheel, his bass hammering out a lead like gospel’s answer to Motown’s James Jamerson.
In the New Nazareth Church concert, Pops connects the themes of gospel music and the civil rights movement more explicitly than ever before. It presents him not just as a musical innovator, but as a philosopher, preacher, and visionary, a melding of black church music and black popular music for a common cause. Church music was no longer just about making it through this world to get to the next one; it was also about living right now in the streets all African Americans shared.
“We got a better home, children,” Pops says at one point. “And in that land over there, we have friends and loved ones. . . . I have a mother and father. They’re waiting and watching for me. I don’t know when the Lord is gonna call . . . I want to make heaven my own, but I want to enjoy myself a little down here, too.”
And finally, he makes explicit what his own life might be about: “I just want to leave a record so that someone might follow in my footsteps.”