Tag: mahalia jackson

Kronos Quartet Wants You To Know Mahalia Jackson’s Impact

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“If Mahalia Jackson were singing right now, I would have figured out a way that we would be able to perform with her,” says David Harrington, co-founder and violinist of Kronos Quartet, an ensemble that in its more than 50 years has consistently set new standards for what a string quartet can be.

He laughs as he leans into the camera on a Zoom from his San Francisco home, his white hair sticking straight up.

“You can count on that.”

Of course, that’s impossible. Mahalia Jackson, the New Orleans-born gospel singer, voice of the Civil Rights Movement, mentor to Aretha Franklin, confidant of and advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., died in 1972 at age 60. But Harrington got close. A little while back he commissioned composer Stacy Garrop to craft musical settings for excerpts from a 1963 interview conversation Jackson did with Chicago radio host Studs Terkel, a longtime friend of hers, and from performances broadcast in 1957.

The result is Glorious Mahalia, a five-part suite and the title piece of a new Kronos Quartet album featuring the ensemble’s recent lineup of Harrington, John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Sunny Yang (cellos). It’s insightful and bold, the music echoing and enhancing the conversations, at times cordial, but also at times testy between these two friends as Jackson tells Terkel that he can never understand the experience of Black people in America.

And in one segment, Harrington gets right up next to his wish, as Kronos performs to a recording of Jackson singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” It is, indeed, glorious.

Mahalia Jackson photo by Lacey Crawford (courtesy of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.)

This is complemented by another suite, “Peace Be Till,” commissioned by Kronos from composer Zachary Watkins, incorporating reminiscences by King lawyer and speechwriter Clarence Jones as recorded by Harrington about the friendship between King and Jackson. At its core is the moment in a 1963 rally as he watched Jackson interrupt the written speech King was giving, shouting to him, “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” spurring one of the most impactful orations of modern times, the extemporaneous “I Have a Dream.”

An instrumental arrangement by composer Jacob Garchik of Antonio Haskell’s hymn “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away,” based on a 1937 Jackson recording, serves as a perfect interlude between the suites. Kronos has performed the song for years, including a stunning version with Mali’s Trio Da Kali on the 2017 album Ladilikan.

Kronos has long used spoken oral histories in its vast, wildly eclectic career. There is 1988’s landmark Different Trains, composed for the quartet by Steve Reich, juxtaposing audio accounts from a former Pullman porter and survivors of Holocaust transports, and last year’s Witness, by composer Mary Kouyoumdjian, with audio from survivors of the Lebanese civil war and the Armenian genocide. Glorious Mahalia’s themes of social justice also connect to, among many others, 2020’s Long Time Passing, a celebration of Pete Seeger, and 2022’s My Lai, the Jonathan Berger/Scott Chessman opera about the 1968 U.S. Army massacre of a Vietnam village. The new album follows those latter two as the third Kronos release from Smithsonian Folkways.

Harrington discusses all of this in a generous, wide-ranging chat for BGS, edited for length and clarity.

What were your first experiences with Mahalia Jackson’s music?

David Harrington: I think I heard her on television as a kid. But it was Hank Dutt, our longtime violist, who gave me an LP of hers in the late ‘70s. It just blew me away. Have you seen Summer of Soul, that film [Questlove’s 2021 documentary about the 1969 Harlem Music Festival]? Then you’ve seen Mahalia on that. Our family watched it, my daughter, son-in-law, grandkids, wife, and I watched together. And wow, when Mahalia got on, I said to everyone, “I have never seen a singer with a full-body vibrato before!” [Laughs] That was one of the most amazing performances I’ve seen in my life.

Glorious Mahalia springs from the conversations between Mahalia and Studs Terkel, and then it feels like Stacy Garrop joins the conversations with her music, and then Kronos join in too, all of you in a four-way exchange.

That’s a beautiful expression of it. I’ve never thought of it that way. What I wanted to do was hear all the interviews [Terkel] ever did with Mahalia. And that’s where my conversation started with Stacy Garrop. I think she knew a lot about his work, so it started there, really. We wanted a piece that celebrates their friendship and relationship, and what they brought to our society and our country.

It’s not always an easy conversation between Terkel and Jackson. She pushes back on him, even snaps at him that he can never know what it’s like to be her, to be Black in America. Was that part of your process with this, to consider, culturally and experientially what your place is in terms of presenting her views and experiences?

It gets back to wanting to perform with Mahalia Jackson. [Laughs] It’s like, every once in a while I hear a musician – I’m lucky as an explorer of music – I’ll hear something that is just so amazingly powerful. I want to find a way of bringing it into my own experience and that of the other members of Kronos and of our audience. And so I think I’ve been really consistent about that through the years.

The question is, what gives me the right to do that? I guess I’ve never really asked that question too often, because this is what musicians do. I’m absolutely convinced that if Beethoven would have heard some of the amazing musicians in India or various places around the world in his time, he would have wanted to bring elements of that music into his work in some way or another. Beethoven did a lot of transcriptions of Scottish music!

The first thing we hear on the album is Jackson’s voice, alone, singing the words “hold on.” It’s gripping and powerful, and must be even more so in a darkened theater for both you and the audience, hearing that before you even start playing.

Yeah, it’s about as good as it gets!

And then, from there, your task is to enhance and echo and illustrate the tone of her voice.

We’re also commenting, and our role takes on different kinds of complexities, being there as a platform for [Jackson’s and Jones’s] thoughts and voices to exist.

You have a history of projects that let others tell their cultural stories and experiences, from the oral histories of Different Trains and Witness to working with composers and musicians from many different places and traditions around the globe. This one is more centered on one person, though.

It goes back a long way, and thinking how to present this on a Kronos album – not only the voice, but the personality, the force, just the being of Mahalia Jackson. [That] was what I felt would be a good thing to do. That really came into focus when right around the 50th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech, Clarence Jones was on television and he recounted how the speech became the speech as we know it.

When he described that moment of hearing Mahalia Jackson, someone King relied on in moments of need, Clarence spoke of when she would sing to him on the phone. I mean, when you think of anybody in the universe, a leader like Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights leader, a spiritual leader, and he’s getting sustenance from a musician!

So then the speech is happening and, from what I can gather, she wasn’t quite hearing what she needed to hear from her friend. And so she called out to him: “Tell them about the dream.” When I heard that story I thought, “Okay, I get it. Mahalia Jackson has defined to me the role of musicians, the musical community in our world.” It was so clear. And what we get to do as musicians is listen. We listen to our inner selves, we listen to our families and our friends and our society.

In this case, Mahalia Jackson used her musical ability and listened to Martin Luther King and then gave him feedback. “Come on. I’ve heard you do better.” Now, am I imagining this? I don’t know if I am. I don’t even care, because it kind of defined something for me about my own role and the role of Kronos and musicians. So at that moment I thought, “I need to get in touch with Clarence Jones.”

This project started a few years back, but it’s coming out as the U.S. celebrates its 250th birthday. How does that timing feel, especially with the current political and cultural climate?

We’re doing a triptych, “Three Bones,” that’s premiering at Carnegie Hall [on April 25]. Part one will [draw on] Indigenous cultures. Part two will be African American, particularly Gullah Geechee [of the Southeastern U.S.]. Part three will be Chinese and Chinese American.

I’d like to make an experience that brings these three essential elements of American society to the stage at Carnegie Hall as our contribution to the 250 years. It’s about listening. It is just growing from listening. That kind of gets back to Mahalia.

Back to the idea of a conversation, it seems like it’s not just with Jackson and Terkel, but with the nation, with the cultures and the experiences, and not a static situation from 60 years ago. Does it feel like your relationship with Mahalia, her music, and her mission is something living and evolving?

I am very happy when Kronos gets to play this music on a college campus and for audiences that maybe never heard Mahalia Jackson, never heard about her, [or heard] that an artist can have very powerful ideas about life and our society. [About] what’s good and what’s right, and can express them as beautifully as Mahalia Jackson and Studs Terkel and Clarence Jones. You put these leaders together and it’s very impressive. And I don’t think there’s an expiration date there.

Photo Credit: Lead image of Kronos Quartet by Lenny Gonzalez. Inset image of Mahalia Jackson by Lacey Crawford courtesy of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

Despite a Sad And Beautiful World, Mavis Staples Still Transcends

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Such words as “legendary,” “transcendent,” and “magnificent,” while accurate, only skim the surface in describing the greatness of vocalist Mavis Staples. There’s no idiomatic area where she doesn’t excel and no song, regardless of origin or writer, that she can’t turn into a personal triumph. She’s also a genuine survivor, both in the familial (she’s the last living member of the Staple Singers) and socio-political sense (she’s a cultural warrior and champion of the Civil Rights era whose resonant voice has inspired generations of listeners).

For many artists, claiming they’ve gotten better with age is at best polite overstatement, and at worst woeful exaggeration. But Staples at 86 still has the authoritative edge, tonal quality, and lyrical flair that’s always marked her performances. It seems hard to believe she’s been singing since childhood, and listening to the 10 tracks on her newest release, Sad And Beautiful World (released November 7 by Anti), you hear the confident, jubilant sound of a vocal titan.

That Staples can cover with equal distinction and flair songs penned by Tom Waits, Curtis Mayfield, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Leonard Cohen, and Frank Ocean reaffirms her versatility. Producer Brad Cook smartly lets her voice dominate through each setting, regardless of instrumental backdrops, tempo or lyrical setting. Her spoken word narrative adds additional punch to the cover of Ocean’s “Godspeed” and underscores its recurring themes of urgency and redemption that fuel the album’s sensibility.

But the album also contains prominent message tracks, most notably “We Got To Have Peace,” a number whose tone and lyrics couldn’t be more timely in an era where it seems lunacy often runs supreme. “Anthem” and “Satisfied Mind” are just as powerful and energetic in their declarations of the importance of persistence, kindness, and goodwill. “Everybody Needs Love” provides the perfect finale, with Staples superbly punctuating its theme and completing a 38-minute epic work. Indeed, songwriter Kevin Morby has offered perhaps the best tribute to Staples’ brilliance possible, when he gave a press statement about what it meant to have her doing his song “Beautiful Strangers,” which is another memorable and passionate number.

“It isn’t easy to put into words what it feels like having one of the best, most important vocalists and cultural figures of both the 20th and 21st century sing one of my songs,” Morby said. “But hearing Mavis sing ‘Beautiful Strangers’ is hands down the greatest moment and highest honor of my career. Far beyond any kind of accolade or acclaim – having one of my biggest heroes sing something I wrote is the most validating and flattering thing that could ever happen to me as a songwriter and person. Thank you, Mavis.”

Staples has been awesome for so long, sometimes it’s easy to forget how many different periods and genres her artistry covers. The original family unit the Staple Singers were gospel and folk song giants. The unit included her sisters Cleotha and Yvonne, plus her brother Pervis, her father Pops, whose roots reached back to the seminal days of Delta blues, and Charlie Patton, who served as anchor, both vocally and on guitar. The Staple Singers began singing in Chicago churches in the late ’40s, became recording artists in the early ’50s, and earned their first hit with “Uncloudy Day” in 1952, recorded for the Black-owned label Vee-Jay. By the ’60s they were a cornerstone unit of the Civil Rights Movement, often accompanying Dr. Martin Luther King at rallies.

Mavis began really getting noticed as a solo performer during their transition in the late ’60s and early ’70s to a soul and pop unit. The decision to sign with Stax Records and the shift to secular music was one Pops often acknowledged as a controversial one, but it ultimately paid off as the group’s status elevated into crossover stars. They had eight Top hits in the early and mid-’70s; “I’ll Take You There” and “Let’s Do It Again” were chart toppers and “Who Took The Merry Out of Christmas” reached number two. Mavis also cut her first solo single in the late ’60s, then a full self-titled release for Stax in 1969. Their songs were expertly produced, featuring the crisp and outstanding backing of Booker T. & the MGs. Other essential hits included “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself.”

Slowly but surely, Mavis began to establish herself outside the Staples family trademark. Her soundtrack LP, A Piece of the Action on Curtis Mayfield’s label, helped her reach some new audiences, as did another self-titled mid-‘80s LP. But it was a pair of releases produced by Prince in the ’90s that really helped her reach the next generation of listeners. The second by the duo, The Voice, was another masterpiece. It included her magical version of Prince’s “Positivity,” as well as a cover of “Melody Cool” from the film Graffiti Bridge. Staples returned to the church in 1996 for a marvelous release, Spirituals & Gospels: Dedicated to Mahalia Jackson, that personified the close friendship that Jackson had with the entire Staples family and her influence on Mavis, personally and professionally.

Over the course of the 21st century, Mavis Staples has unquestionably become an iconic figure. The roster of artists with whom she’s worked over the course of her remarkable career is an astonishing one, both in terms of talent and musical approach. She’s recorded with jazz guitarist John Scofield, Los Lobos, Bob Dylan, Johnny Paycheck, Natalie Merchant, George Jones, Delbert McClinton, Aretha Franklin, Nona Hendryx, and Ann Peebles, to cite only a handful. Staples has also continued making emphatic message albums, among them the 2017 dynamo If All I Was Was Black. Her voice has been sampled by rappers and hip-hop and pop artists like Salt ‘N’ Pepa, Ice Cube, Ludacris, and Hozier.

Mavis also been featured in a host of television shows and films, among them The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Show With David Letterman, Conan, and “CBS Saturday Morning: Saturday Sessions,” and she was the featured performer on the very first episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Her film resume includes appearances in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz and Antoine Fuqua’s documentary Lightning in a Bottle, about the Salute to the Blues concert at Radio City Music Hall in February 2003.

Mavis!, the first feature documentary about Staples and the Staple Singers, was directed by Jessica Edwards and had its world premiere at SXSW in March 2015. It was later screened in theaters and was broadcast on HBO in February 2016, eventually winning a Peabody Award. Her appearance with Mahalia Jackson at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival is among the many highlights in the award-winning documentary Summer of Soul, which was released in 2021. Staples has even been portrayed on film, played by Laura Kariuki in the 2024 hit film, A Complete Unknown.

Staples has rightly won numerous awards. The array includes three GRAMMYs and a GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award, induction into the Rock and Roll, Gospel Music, and Blues Halls of Fame, and having been a Kennedy Center Honoree. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honored her a second time in 2019 with the inaugural Rock Hall Honors Award for her solo work. Rolling Stone named her 56th among the “100 Greatest Singers of all Time” in 2008, though there was already no question about her inclusion in that select company.

Amazingly, there doesn’t seem to be any slowing down for Mavis Staples. She celebrated her 80th birthday at the Apollo Theater in 2019, returning to the famed venue where she first appeared as a teenager 63 years before that date. She did a series of collaborative birthday concerts that year with special guests that included David Byrne and Norah Jones. She also collaborated with Run the Jewels on the track “Pulling the Pin” from their studio album RTJ4. In 2022, Staples released Carry Me Home, a collaborative effort with the late Levon Helm that they recorded together at Helm’s Midnight Ramble in 2011.

She’s already announced upcoming tour dates for 2026 at three famous sites: Chicago’s Chicago Theatre, Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, and New York’s Beacon Theatre. Mavis Staples also remains a voice for social justice. Way back in 2010, she performed at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear alongside singer Jeff Tweedy. In 2011, she was joined onstage at the Outside Lands Music And Arts Festival by Arcade Fire singer Win Butler. The two performed a version of “The Weight” by The Band. Shortly after the release of her 2016 LP Livin’ On A High Note, produced by M. Ward with songs written for her by Nick Cave, Justin Vernon, Neko Case, and others, Staples issued these prophetic words:

I’ve been singing my freedom songs and I wanted to stretch out and sing some songs that were new. I told the writers I was looking for some joyful songs. I want to leave something to lift people up; I’m so busy making people cry, not from sadness, but I’m always telling a part of history that brought us down and I’m trying to bring us back up.

These songwriters gave me a challenge. They gave me that feeling of, “Hey, I can hang! I can still do this!” There’s a variety, and it makes me feel refreshed and brand new. Just like Benjamin Booker wrote on the opening track, “I got friends and I got love around me, I got people, the people who love me.” I’m living on a high note, I’m above the clouds. I’m just so grateful. I must be the happiest old girl in the world. Yes, indeed.

Anyone paying attention to the songs on Sad And Beautiful World knows that’s still the case with Mavis Staples’ music.

Photo Credit: Elizabeth De La Piedra

The Show On The Road – Allison Russell

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week, we launch season 4 of the show with a bilingual banjo-slinging singer-songwriter originally from Montreal and now based in Nashville: Allison Russell.

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After two decades of quietly creating heart-on-her-sleeve roots music in hard-touring groups like Po’ Girl, Birds Of Chicago, and recently the supergroup Our Native Daughters – playing the guitar, clarinet, banjo and singing in English and French – the spotlight finally fell straight on Russell in 2021. With the help of her husband and longtime creative partner JT Nero, she released her visceral debut solo record Outside Child which confronts her traumatic childhood head on.

Rarely has an album struck such a nerve in the Americana community, as songs like “4th Day Prayer” use the slippery soul of Al Green’s best work and Mahalia Jackson’s gospel inspiration to paint in white-knuckled detail how she escaped the abusive home of her stepfather for the graveyards and streets of Montreal. As she tells us in the intense conversation from her home in Tennessee, it was her songwriting hero Brandi Carlile who went to bat for her (a bold Instagram DM set fate in motion,) helping get her raw, unreleased songs to Fantasy Records. Thankfully, they wanted to take a leap. Even President Obama noticed after the songs began to circulate and he put her ominous radio standout “Nightflyer” on his favorite songs of the year list. The album has since been nominated for three Grammy awards.

While Allison may feel like an “overnight sensation” to those just discovering her on AAA radio, hearing her soaring voice shining on stages from Carnegie Hall, Red Rocks and the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, she’s been playing hundreds of shows in small clubs and festivals around the world for twenty-two years and counting. It hasn’t been an easy road, as she often had to her young daughter on the trail with her.

With a new book deal in the works continuing her story where Outside Child left off, there is much more to come from Russell. A champion for the often forgotten victims of domestic and sexual abuse, listening to Russell speak reminds one more of a fiery community organizer than a singer. Did your host try and convince Russell to run for office? Maybe.

Stick around to hear her dive into one of her favorite tracks from the new record, the hopeful clarinet shuffle “Poison Arrow.”

LISTEN: Eagle Rock Gospel Singers, ‘No Apologies’

Posted on by Editor

Sure, gospel isn't the first genre that comes to mind when anyone thinks of Los Angeles, but the Eagle Rock Gospel Singers hope to shift that thinking … even just a little. On their upcoming album, Heavenly Fire, the group lets front woman Kim Garcia spread her wings and share their message. And it's a message being heard at festivals around the country, including Austin City Limits, High Sierra, and Pygmalion.

Will Wadsworth and Jeremy Horton started the Gospel Singers five years ago as a way to help Wadsworth through a tough time. Those who gathered worked through songs by Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and others. But one of the biggest influences came from the Staple Singers — Mavis Staples, in particular.

“Obviously, the Staple Singers are a huge influence,” Garcia says. “When I write something, I try to think about what Mavis would sing, and go from there."

Regarding her inspiration for “No Apologies,” she adds, "Violence is an ever-present evil that surrounds us on daily basis. The band may not even know this, but I wrote this song in response to what I was seeing in the news — Ferguson, Charleston — in my Facebook feed, in my Twitter feed, etc. Violence should not be a trending topic, and yet it is. This song is a reminder that we're all on the same side, and that we're all hurting and in need of some kind of help — whether we're asking for it or not.”

Heavenly Fire drops on August 4 via Ba Da Bing Records.

Photo by Emilie Elizabeth.