While recording We’ll Never Turn Back with Ry Cooder in Southern California, Mavis was scheduled to play a concert on July 20, 2006, at the Santa Monica Pier. The opening act was a blues trio led by guitarist Rick Holmstrom, who had previously accompanied Mavis at a quickie duo gig set up by her manager, Dave Bartlett.
“I look to stage right, and the promoter was making a sign for me to stretch: ‘Fifteen more minutes,’ and we do four, five extra songs before we finally get off,” Holmstrom says. “While I’m playing, I notice a guy with big glasses at the side of the stage looking at me and giving me the thumbs-up.”
After the extended set, Holmstrom walked off with his bandmates—bassist Jeff Turmes and drummer Stephen Hodges—and found himself in a backstage huddle with the promoter. Mavis’s touring band was late arriving, delayed by poor weather back in Chicago. “We’ve got to do something,” Bartlett pleaded with Mavis in her dressing room. What about having Holmstrom’s trio play a few songs with Mavis until her band arrived?
“Do you sing any blues?” Holmstrom asked.
“No, I do gospel and soul,” Mavis replied.
But they quickly found some common ground. Holmstrom knew the chord changes for a few songs in Mavis’s set, including “The Weight,” “Freedom Highway,” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” He, Turmes, and Hodges turned what could’ve been a train wreck into something credible until her band arrived to finish out the gig.
“It had me scared—it wasn’t what I normally heard onstage,” Mavis recalls. “But those guys were good, they could jam.”
“We stumbled through some of the changes, but we got through it,” Holmstrom says. “The guy standing off to the side with the glasses turned out to be Ry Cooder. When I got done, he tapped me on the shoulder and said how much he liked us. We’re used to backing up blues singers: You follow the singer, fill in the holes, build up a song from scratch sometimes. They’ll say, ‘Do it in G’ or stomp their foot, and you have to turn it into something right on the sound stage.”
That brief encounter was the beginning of a longer-lasting relationship. Holmstrom’s approach lined up perfectly with the type of record Mavis was making with Cooder, and it linked back to the Staple Singers’ sound in their pre-Stax era—a sound defined as much by Pops’s guitar as Mavis’s voice. Holmstrom wasn’t intimately familiar with Mavis’s repertoire, but he was a big fan of Pops’ guitar playing. “I was at a blues festival in the mid-’90s when this friend of mine told me that my playing reminded him of Pops Staples,” Holmstrom says. “I didn’t think of Pops so much as a guitar player but as a singer. But my friend turned me on to the Staple Singers’ Vee-Jay stuff—he put all the 45s on a tape for me. And I would drive back from gigs playing them. It was great music for coming down after a gig: quiet, airy, not jarring. I became a Pops fan, and his sound started seeping into my own songs. That sparse tremolo sound was very appealing to me, and when I got the call from Mavis’s manager, I broke out those tapes again.”
With the release of We’ll Never Turn Back in April 2007, and its raw, unfussy presentation, Mavis received more attention from critics and concert promoters than she had in more than a decade. She was being offered tour dates to showcase not just her classics but also the new material—the album would eventually sell fifty-nine thousand copies—and she needed a band that could play in that style. Cooder didn’t like to tour, so Bartlett invited Holmstrom to join Mavis on the road with his band and serve as her musical director. It was an overdue change in many ways. Since the late ’70s, Mavis and the Staple Singers hadn’t updated their sound as a touring act; their backing bands were suited for the supper club circuit, but to a younger audience they contributed to a feeling that the Staples were essentially an oldies act. Holmstrom, Turmes, and Hodges were a veteran trio—the guitarist had been playing in blues bands since the late ’80s—but their approach had a lean, contemporary edge and toughness.
“Ry was playing some dangerous guitar on the album,” Mavis says. “The band I’d had for twenty years couldn’t play that way. I finally had to tell them good-bye. I told Ry, ‘You made me change bands.’ He’d been studying Pops for years, and I needed a band that could play in that style. Now I tell Rick, ‘Pops is in your fingers.’ ”
By the spring of 2008, Mavis and the band had turned into a formidable live act. Her sister Yvonne went everywhere with Mavis, including the stage—she was one of three backing vocalists, and she served as a buffer against any hint of anxiety or discouragement.
“When Mavis started to perform again after Pops died, Yvonne was a big part of it,” says Marty Stuart. “She needed to have a member of her family up there on the stage with her, because of the loss of Pops and the absence of Cleedi. Yvonne was always the quietest one. But she was the eagle eye that saw every move somebody would make before they made it. She could sum up somebody two seconds after they walked in the room. One time in Austin, we were rehearsing and I said, ‘Yvonne, tell me about that drummer in your band.’ And she’d say, ‘He’s new to us. Our old drummer called and wanted to be excused to work with someone else. When he came back, I said, “Oh, no, you’re still excused.” ’ ”
Yvonne protected her family like a lioness, and with Pops gone she stepped up as Mavis’s manager, adviser, and tripe buster. “She’s a business gal, but she’s also Mavis’s closest friend,” Stuart says. “She was a reluctant singer, but she knew Mavis needed her, so she sang with her every night onstage. When Mavis and Dylan did that old Jimmie Rodgers routine on that gospel record they did together, Yvonne’s credit was ‘encouragement.’ I don’t think it could’ve been said any better.”
A new alchemy was happening in Mavis’s stage presentation. Her family relationships had resettled and solidified in a way that made her feel at home again. Her reconfigured band held a sound that echoed what she knew and held dear, and yet pushed it forward. Her old friends saw the transformation.
“When I felt her rumbling that she was getting her mind right after Pops’s death and getting steady enough to sing, I called her, I felt her coming back,” Stuart says. “I look back to that scene that day that Mahalia passed the torch to her [in 1969]. I felt there was enough time passed, she had been through enough, and she was ready to take on her role. She was suiting up for her destiny, for the queenship of her destiny. A lot of people had come and gone, and it was Mavis’s time.”
Steve Cropper, who had produced Mavis’s first stab at a solo album in the late ’60s at Stax, saw a more assured and versatile artist than the one he had met four decades earlier. “We did a show in Los Angeles and I got to play behind her, and it was all there: the attitude, the confidence, the ability to entertain,” he says. “She’s found her niche. She wasn’t scared anymore to be on her own. She always had the tools, and now she’s doing it with an ease that was just brilliant.”
Anti-’s Kaulkin wanted to capture that new dynamic in a live recording. They tried first at a concert in Denmark, but Mavis’s voice was hampered by a cold. The next week, on June 23, 2008, they tried again, this time on the singer’s home turf—at an unassuming but beloved blue-collar bar called the Hideout, inconspicuously tucked in a warehouse district off Interstate 94 on Chicago’s West Side. The room held a little more than a hundred people, and the stage was only inches above the floor, barely big enough to hold Mavis and her half dozen musical accomplices. But the nearly claustrophobic conditions led to an intimacy and immediacy that made the performance and live recording one of the pinnacle musical moments in Staples history.
Live: Hope at the Hideout was recorded during the summer Barack Obama was running to become the first African-American president of the United States. The freedom songs on We’ll Never Turn Back sounded more relevant than ever, and the band and Mavis had begun to reshape and expand them live.
The set served as something of a career overview, a mix of homespun tales, righteous anthems, and mournful hymns delivered without fuss or polish. “The stage was so small, we were really cramped, and we were playing really quietly. Oddly enough, it was more powerful because of that,” Holmstrom recalls.
A terse treatment of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” took Mavis back to the Staple Singers’ pre-Stax era. Holmstrom’s shivering “paranoia-strikes-deep” guitar spikes the tune with the appropriate tone of foreboding. The guitarist plays with a rhythmic drive that balances restraint and propulsion. Hodges and Turmes lag just a shade behind the beat, leaving plenty of space for Mavis and the backing singers to maneuver. There’s a rumble in “Eyes on the Prize,” “Down in Mississippi,” and “Wade in the Water,” and barbed-wire toughness in “This Little Light” that matches the call-to-march urgency in Mavis’s voice.
“On My Way to Heaven” is performed at a near whisper, with Mavis and the backing vocalists modulating their voices brilliantly as the song winds down. Mavis even channels Muddy Waters’s “how-how-how” at one moment, as if to wink at the godfather of Chicago blues in the afterlife that the song envisions.
Her rasp turns bereft on the gospel lament “Waiting for My Child.” Accompanied only by Holmstrom’s skeletal guitar, Mavis sings of a mother’s heartbreak, at one point drifting off the microphone and singing to the room unamplified. On “Why Am I Treated So Bad,” her father’s civil rights anthem, the backing vocalists glide over the guitar as Mavis slips into a reverie about how Grandma Ware’s moan kept the devil at bay. “Freedom Highway” rises to life over a snaking guitar riff and Hodges’s hi-hat flurry, and segues into “We Shall Not Be Moved” and Mavis’s recollection of a ’60s protest rally in which she and her fellow marchers were arrested for trying to integrate a Southern diner.
The album closes with Mavis performing a snippet of “I’ll Take You There,” the song that pumped through the loudspeakers to cap many of Obama’s campaign rallies that year. Live: Hope at the Hideout was released on November 4, 2008, the same day that Obama won the election.
That night, the president-elect addressed a huge rally in Grant Park, on the unseasonably balmy Chicago lakefront. “Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us,” he said. “There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after the children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage or pay their doctors’ bills or save enough for their child’s college education. There’s new energy to harness, new jobs to be created, new schools to build, and threats to meet, alliances to repair. The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.”
It was an appeal that could’ve been made in 1965, the same year that the Staple Singers’ “Freedom Highway” was written. Mavis reprised the song at the Hideout: “March up freedom’s highway / March, each and every day.” Now a black man stood ready to accept the oath of office as president of the United States, a huge task ahead of him. Who could have imagined this day back in 1965?
“I think I voted for the right man, said we shall overcome,” Mavis sings, and then lets out a shattering howl. “Made up my mind / And I won’t turn around.” She hadn’t yet arrived. But there was no letup from the drums, bass, guitar, and voices. She’d come too far to stop now.
“My mind is made up,” a breathless Mavis says as the song ends, as if addressing the congregation at a Sunday church service. “And my heart is fixed. And I just refuse to turn around.”