In July 1987, Mavis and Yvonne made the familiar journey to Aretha Franklin’s home in Detroit from Chicago. They hadn’t seen Aretha in years, though they remained close to Aretha’s sisters Carolyn and Erma. But when Franklin decided to record a live gospel album as a sequel to her 1972 classic, Amazing Grace, she invited Mavis to sing with her.
The performance was scheduled at New Bethel Baptist Church, which had been founded by Aretha’s father, C. L. Franklin, in the 1940s. It opened in candlelight, on a stifling August night in the unair-conditioned church. Carolyn, Erma, and their cousin Brenda Corbett provided backing vocals, and a hundred-member choir brought even more firepower.
Jesse Jackson introduced Aretha as “Sister Beloved, the one who wears the coat of many colors.” Later in the performance, Aretha took to the pulpit to introduce her old friends from Chicago, recalling the night decades earlier on “a dark Mississippi road” when the Franklins ran into the Staples family on the gospel circuit.
Together, Aretha and Mavis rang out the hosannas on Edwin Hawkins’s “Oh Happy Day,” followed by the exuberant hand-waving gospel stomp “We Need Power.” The two singers worked the aisles together, the fans on their feet. Pianist Nick Johnson danced madly when he wasn’t pounding the keys. Nurses attended to worshippers overcome by the heat, the singing, or both.
When the live recording, “One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism,” was released in December, the tensions that had always hung over the relationship between the two singers resurfaced. Mavis groused that her voice had been mixed below Aretha’s, and Aretha acknowledged as much in her subsequent autobiography: “Well, I didn’t play her down, but I sure didn’t feel like she should be louder than I was on my own album. Mavis has a very heavy voice and for us to sound equal, I had to put her just below me in the mix.”
The three-day gospel fest at New Bethel also proved to be one of Carolyn Franklin’s last major public performances. She would die of cancer the following April in Aretha’s home, at age forty-three.
“I would call her and we’d talk all night,” Mavis recalls. “She’d tell me how she felt, what she was dreaming. I told my sisters we needed to go to Detroit to see Carolyn. Aretha had her fixed up in the basement with a hospital bed and round-the-clock nurses. I took a [stuffed] yellow Big Bird from Sesame Street with us, and when I got there, I started acting crazy to entertain Carolyn, saying funny things, getting on the floor and trying to turn a somersault. The nurse said, ‘I’ve never seen her laugh like this. I’m so glad you came.’ I could see Aretha peeping down in the basement, but she never came down while we were there.”
A little over a month after Mavis sang with Aretha in Detroit, Oceola Staples died at sixty-nine in the south suburban Chicago home she shared with Pops. The couple had celebrated their fiftieth anniversary only three years earlier at Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side, and now the couple’s friends and relatives would gather again at the church to honor the Staples’ matriarch one final time.
Amid the sadness, Mavis found herself in demand again: Prince was trying to track her down. In the spring of 1987, Prince had just released the double album Sign o’ the Times, a masterpiece affirming his status as the pop world’s most formidable quintuple threat: singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, and performer. He was selling millions of albums even as he was blending and blurring lines between genres, genders, and generations like few artists ever had. Though Michael Jackson may have been the self-proclaimed “King of Pop,” and Bruce Springsteen was the new fist-pumping populist in blue jeans at the top of the arena-rock circuit, Prince was in many ways the decade’s most diverse, difficult-to-pigeonhole megastar. He was omnivorous in his cultural appetites, his ongoing obsession with music, new and old, informing a deep respect for his artistic predecessors.
In 1987, Prince fell hard for the artistry of Mavis Staples. When LaBelle singer Nona Hendryx recorded his song “Baby Go-Go,” Mavis’s fierce backing vocals evoked a “Who’s that?” from Prince. He dug back and started listening to and watching everything he could find on her career. The lightbulb moment arrived when he came across the Staple Singers’ performance in the Soul to Soul movie, documenting their 1971 concert in Ghana. Mavis sings until she is so inside the moment her eyes well and her voice trembles: “My Lord, my Lord, my Lord, it may not come just when you want it . . . but I can say He will be right there.”
Prince’s eyes glisten, too, when he re-creates the moment: “I’ve been in love with Mavis since I saw that movie. I would watch her, and the part where they sing a cappella, it’s like when you see someone possessed. They get the Holy Ghost in them and they’re overtaken by something. My grandmother would pass out because she’d be overwhelmed by that Holy Ghost feeling. It’s like you can call something into existence, and Mavis can call that up just like that [snaps fingers]. Just like that. I look at her and I wonder if . . . she goes somewhere else, becomes of what she sings about. When I saw that moment in Soul to Soul, I thought, ‘This is my mother.’ When I met her, we recognized each other. After all these years I’d finally met this person, and it’s like I’d known her all my life. That’s how deeply that music, her voice, her presence affected me.”
In 1987, Mavis turned forty-eight years old. By MTV-era standards, she was already a has-been, and some days she felt like one. She couldn’t even land a weekend job deejaying gospel records or shilling for hair products. But her magnificence was undiminished when put in the proper context, and Prince knew he was in a position to provide that.
“Fame is . . . something that comes from outside,” he says. “With someone like Mavis, there’s another level of consciousness. People can be famous for only a short while, it comes and goes based on the way people on the outside project what they want in celebrity. But it’s about music for me. And she had more music in her, I could hear that and feel that.”
Mystery that he is, Prince was not much for talk of any kind in 1987, which baffled the garrulous Mavis. His manager, Rob Cavallo, called Pops that spring looking for Mavis. “I said, ‘What’s Prince gonna write for me?’ ” Mavis says. “I’d heard the songs he’s written for Apollonia and Vanity, and I wouldn’t sing that stuff. That’s teenybopper stuff. But he [Cavallo] said, ‘Prince is very much aware of the nature of your talent, and he will be writing adult contemporary songs for you.’ If I could have done a cartwheel right there, I would have.”
A few months later, in August, Cavallo called again to say Prince wanted to meet Mavis backstage at a Staple Singers concert at the Los Angeles Forum. “I thought I was gonna be cool when I met him,” Mavis says. “But when I met him backstage—with his white suit, Lucite cane, his white pumps—cool went out the window. I just screamed. He was so cute. I said, ‘Prince, let me kiss you for my mother.’ And he said, ‘Kiss me on this side for your mother, too.’ He was bashful—rolling them eyes.”
The two chatted for forty-five minutes in the dressing room, with Mavis dominating the conversation, in part to avoid the awkward silences that were Prince’s specialty at the time. “I was shy and I was in awe,” Prince says now. “I was just taken with everything about her.”
Pops was more than an interested bystander. “My father came into the dressing room, and he said, ‘Young man, it was mighty nice of you to come out here and meet Mavis.’ And all he said to my father was, ‘You can play.’ ”
Mavis was thrilled about the opportunity but concerned whether she and Prince would ever break the ice and be able to talk like true collaborators. The next year, Prince asked Mavis to join him on the “Lovesexy” tour in Paris, and she dueted with him on the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There.”
“By the time we got to London, he opened up totally, telling me all kinds of things about himself and what he was trying to do with his music,” she says. Mavis began writing eleven- to fifteen-page letters on yellow legal paper to Prince that were ostensibly about her life but that helped Prince just as much in living his.
“When we started working together, she’d write me letters, and she’d want to make sure I was eating properly, taking care of myself,” Prince says. “When I got the first one, I thought it was so sweet. Then she wrote another, and another. They were all so encouraging. She was telling me about herself so I could write songs for her, but she was helping me. When you get so much discouragement from the world, to read her words was so valuable to me. She sustained me.”
The first Mavis album on the singer’s Paisley Park label, Time Waits for No One, was written and produced by Prince, with two songwriting contributions from her old Stax compatriot Homer Banks. The album was on point sonically, a sharp-edged slice of Minneapolis funk in the mold of Prince-style hits from the Time, Sheila E., and P-Funk leader George Clinton: whip-crack snare drums, jabbing keyboards, terse guitar incisions, vocals marinated in sass. Banks’s Caribbean-flavored “20th Century Express” returned Mavis to the type of topical songs that made the Staple Singers run, and his warmly nostalgic ballad “The Old Songs” evoked a bygone era they both shared. Prince’s contributions range from the slamming, witty “Interesting” to the cheesy “Jaguar,” which has Mavis growling like a big cat on the hunt. The title track is where it all comes together, a slow-build, bell-ringing anthem about a woman running out of patience.
“I can’t just sit around watching my life pass me by,” Mavis sings.
Prince began to sync more deeply with Mavis on “Melody Cool,” a song for his 1990 movie, Graffiti Bridge. Mavis would also play a character named Melody Cool in the movie, in which Prince’s alter ego, “The Kid,” and the Time’s Morris Day joust for ownership of the Glam Slam nightclub. The hokey plot was salvaged by the music, with Mavis as a voice of plainspoken wisdom. The track turns on a phrase often repeated by her father—“There are no big ‘I’s’ and little ‘yous’ ”—that Prince found irresistible.
“You’re just as good as anyone else, Pops would say,” Mavis explains. “Don’t ever think you’re any better than anyone else, but don’t ever think anyone is better than you.”
The movie was a commercial and critical flop, but Mavis came out of it with her profile raised and her reputation enhanced. Her letters helped Prince build a strong backlog of songs for her next studio album, The Voice, in 1993, easily her strongest work since the ’70s. “After the first album, the disc jockeys were saying that Prince is trying to make a female Prince out of Mavis, and they didn’t like it,” she says. “So the second one, he took my letters, and he wrote my life. Every song I’d hear something that was in my letters.”
“The Undertaker” strolled through drug-infested streets, with Mavis as an impassioned tour guide. “I told him I married an undertaker, he wrote me a song called ‘The Undertaker,’ an antidrug song: ‘Don’t go with the crack, you might never come back.’ It was a message song, tied in with this little extra twist to my personal life.”
Biblical references peppered “Blood Is Thicker than Time,” an ode to family and memory. “He told me he wrote that for my family. I had to stop about three times singing that song, I couldn’t get through it. My mother had passed, and that’s what had gotten the whole thing started.” Like “Melody Cool,” “House in Order” came out of an impromptu remark Mavis made, this time advising a couple of female singers she overheard smack-talking about men. The album was a superb melding of Mavis’s life, personality, and voice with Prince’s craftsmanship and vision, but it got buried as Prince was in the final stages of his long, painful divorce from Warner Bros. It was in 1993 that Prince changed his name to a symbol as if trying to erase his past, and three years later he severed his ties with the label.
Despite the drama, the Prince association restored Mavis’s stature as an artist, and by extension the relevance of the Staple Singers. A series of box sets began chronicling the history of Stax Records in the early ’90s, prominently featuring the Staples’ work, and BeBe and CeCe Winans scored a number 1 R&B hit in 1991 with a remake of “I’ll Take You There,” with a Mavis cameo. The Winans were a top gospel group at the time, building on the Staples’ tradition of tying in religious themes with secular lyrics and contemporary music.
“I think they opened up some doors for everybody,” CeCe Winans said of the Staples in a 1992 interview. “You have those who feel that gospel music is only to be done one way,” but the genre’s broader range is “accepted now because the Staples went before.”
For Mavis, the respect from a younger generation of artists such as Prince and the Winans coincided with a renewed appreciation for her family’s music. A few years earlier, she felt adrift. Now she felt vindicated—and grateful for a new start.
“We got a lot of flak from the church when [we began singing contemporary gospel], because they felt we had abandoned the principles,” she said in a 1992 interview. “It was very flattering that BeBe and CeCe wanted to sing a song that we recorded 20 years ago, when they were 6 and 8 years old. Now, you know that made me feel real good that this generation wants to hear that—you feel that you served a purpose. It’s kind of like an artist giving you your flowers while you can still smell them.”