Mavis Staples Sings “Pops’ Recipe”
Listen to this track by beloved message music maven and former family-monikered band member Mavis Staples. It’s “Pop’s Recipe”, a deep cut taken from her 2004 album Have a Little Faith. That record found Mavis on a comeback trail after an eight-year recording hiatus. In doing so, she put everything she’s great at into her new record, with gospel-inspired lyrical sentiments matching a funky R&B texture and even some more acoustically-inclined material, too. At the center of it all is Mavis’ voice, by then a textured instrument full of affectionate, matronly gravitas.
Be that as it may, her perspective here on this song is more about her role as a daughter. Four years before, her father and Staple Singers founder Roebuck “Pops” Staples had passed away. “Pop’s Recipe” is a tribute to her dad, a person who helped to shape her values and musical life. The song is less immediately elegiac only because it is so supremely funky. This was another value Pops brought to the sound of the group he formed with his children back in the early 1950s.
“Pops’ Recipe” is extremely personal, of course. But there again, so was the whole record. Mavis financed it herself. This was after a period she spent off of the road to take care of her older sister and former bandmate Cleotha who was suffering from Alzheimer’s. This was in addition to sustaining the loss of her beloved father. In going through those experiences, and losing some momentum when it came to her career as a result, Mavis Staples had a lot to say to the world by the time she came out on the other end of the tunnel with this record in the can and ready to share.
Her overall message is rooted in Biblical terms; have a little faith, even if it’s the size of a mustard seed. That attitude likely came in handy when she was going through family challenges, as well as when she was shopping the album around on her own steam. Being a female artist in her mid-sixties was a marketing challenge for many a label, evidently. But Mavis Staples’ history remained a compelling success story across multiple eras of music history. And of course – no one can sing like Mavis Staples. So, stalwart contemporary blues and soul label Alligator Records picked up Have a Little Faith very happily.
Stylistically speaking, her range had been very wide over the span of her long career by 2004. She’d sung pure gospel in the Fifties, civil rights anthems in the Sixties , and funk-soul hits in the 1970s that espoused radical positivity applied to social consciousness. She applied all that to rock music too, demonstrated in The Staple Singers’ memorable appearance with The Band in the film The Last Waltz. She even worked with Prince in the Eighties and Nineties. By the turn of the century, she had a lot to offer.
Importantly, she was able to intermingle those styles into a refined yet also vividly elemental sound of her own. With an array of musical ingredients across a gospel-blues-soul-funk-rock spectrum, “Pop’s Recipe” was a way of thanking the man who significantly influenced her as an artist and as a person from the beginning. This went beyond just musical style. This is a song about character and integrity.
Accept responsibility
Don’t forget humility
At every opportunity
Serve your artistry
Don’t subscribe to bigotry
Hypocrisy, duplicity
Respect humanity
That’s Pops recipe, y’all …
– “Pops’ Recipe” by Mavis Staples
As much as the lyrics to “Pop’s Recipe” are a tribute to what Mavis and her siblings learned from their father, so is the music. The immensely funky guitar part is pure Pops, mirroring his distinctive fretwork so essential to The Staple Singers’ sound. The whirling, churchy organ evokes childhood Sunday mornings in tow with Pops, full of gospel fire. These textures are matched with a solid and implacable groove and very Staple Singers-like backing vocals.
The whole sound underpins Mavis’ passionate but never overwrought lead as she sings about the example her father set on how to live a life of integrity in a morally ambiguous world. The message is clear, and the music brings it home.
The Staple Singers as they appeared on Soul Train
on June 8, 1974. Pops is second from the left between his daughters Cleotha and Yvonne. TV host Don Cornelius is second from the right. Mavis is next to him.That’s one of the many elements that makes this song so effective and affecting; it’s as much a lesson that Mavis is conveying to her audience as it is a token of love to her departed father. What Pops stood for is just as valuable today as ever. And besides the strong sense we get about Pops as a man of character, the takeaway here is that we can all have positive and lasting impact on the people in our lives who will always remember us after we’re gone. And the world will be a better place when we pass that on.
That’s just what Mavis does in this song. She offers her experiences, feelings, thoughts, and sensibilities that she took from her father and passes them on to us. In this, we see that Mavis is better than her word when it comes to living the values that her dad taught her and that shaped her as a person of kindness and integrity.
The success of Have a Little Faith sparked a renaissance for Mavis Staples. It garnered great reviews, sales, and an award or two as well, and helped her get back her career momentum and then some. She’d go on to work with a galaxy of musical stars from Ry Cooder to Jeff Tweedy, Arcade Fire to Gorillaz, and many others. The music she made by the end of the 2000s and into the 2010s was and still is very highly rated. In fact, it’s considered to be among the best music of her life. Take that, ageist record labels! All along the way, she continues to follow Pops’ Recipe, taking every opportunity to serve her artistry for the benefit of us all.
Mavis Staples is an active singer today, putting out material on the celebrated Anti-Records label. You can learn more about her celebrated history as a musician at mavisstaples.com.
For additional insight and perspectives on her Have a Little Faith album, check out this Mavis Staples episode from The Deeper Cuts podcast wherein your humble writer and editor talks about the personal impact of this record during his earliest period as a Dad with a daughter.
Enjoy!
#2000sMusic #gospelBlues #MavisStaples #PopsStaples #TheStapleSingers
