Mavis Staples, If All I Was Was Black
A fuzzy drone can be heard 40 seconds into “No Time For Crying,” the sixth track on Mavis Staples’ new album, If All I Was Was Black. It’s faint at first, but, like a kettle coming to boil, slowly swells in heat and intensity. A minute in and the drone can be identified for what it is: a single lightly distorted note, A3, plucked prestissimo on guitar to reinforce the main riff. The effect is a hum so subtle as to be mistaken for overtone. Just as it becomes familiar, the note suddenly turns into something more, a lick, which then splinters into two licks, now three, and within a few seconds the lone guitar has become an explosion of dueling voices whirring like a tornado.
Fans of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, the singer-songwriter who penned the album’s music and lyrics, are familiar with chaotic, discordant guitar solos. But this one comes from the gut, like a primal scream, smack in the middle of a Mavis Staples album. Staples began performing in the late ’50s with The Staple Singers, a Chicago-based family band with a knack for soul, R&B, and gospel. She’s teamed up with Tweedy twice before, on You Are Not Alone from 2010 and again three years later on the critically-acclaimed One True Vine. Both records, recorded at Wilco’s home studio on Chicago’s north side, mesh the Americana folk beloved by Tweedy with the tender, stately spirituality of Staples, now 78 years old.
The duo didn’t dabble much into politics in their previous collaborations. But Trump has changed their tune. “There is something that feels complicit at this moment in time about not facing what is happening in this country head on,” Tweedy said in a statement. If All I Was Was Black is a conscious response to the 2016 election, even as its overarching conceit — a return to a forward-thinking politics of hope — harkens back to the ascension of the nation’s first African-American president in 2008. (“We Go High,” the eighth track, takes its chorus from Michelle Obama’s speech at last summer’s Democratic National Convention.) “I have a simple dream / my heart filled with hope” Staples sings on “Peaceful Dream,” an acoustic folk-blues ballad with the singalong cheer of a campaign rally or a backyard bonfire. “I may never know what broke those chains / if i don’t pass it on it won’t last.”
Tweedy and Staples see the best in their countrymen. The album has few recriminations and, beyond oblique allusions to protests and post-truth disinformation, steers clear of current affairs. The inter-racial, inter-generational pair wants to “build a bridge” (the fitting title of the seventh track) between alienated groups: black boys nervous to walk their own streets alone, unemployed coal miners anxious about what the future holds, families of all colors and creeds “that we don’t ever see / standing side by side us, divided / lonely in the land of free.”
That’s not to say Staples and Tweedy are bullish on the state of the country. “It’s like a rainy day / that never goes away,” Staples sings on “Who Told You That?” Still, the duo refrains from castigating others and instead turns their ire inward, on themselves. “There’s evil in the world / and there’s evil in me,” Staples sings on “Try Harder.” “Don’t do me no good to pretend / I’m as good as I can be.” It’s a shrewd rhetorical move that sidesteps the twin traps of coming across as holier-than-thou and further cleaving the divisions the artists hope to close.
Few divisions seem harder to close than race, which looms large on the record. Staples, a legend of Chicago soul, brings truths born from experience to the conscientious lyrics from Tweedy, a white man who came of age with Generation X. “When I say my life matters / you can say yours does too,” Staples ventures on “Build A Bridge,” “but I bet you don’t have to remind anyone / to look at it from your point of view.” Speaking to her white audience, Staples puts down #AllLivesMatter decisively, if at a distance. Because the news cycle is ephemeral—only art is eternal. What underlies both, Staples and Tweedy are pointing out, is humanity, which for all its flaws has to find a way to move from the dangerous and destructive impulses of the former toward the ameliorating effects of the latter.
Because even race, that pernicious social fabrication as durable as it is baneful, isn’t the only story. “If all I was was black,” wails Staples on the title track, “don’t you wanna know me more than that?” Race may color our world, but it doesn’t control it — at least not more than any of the other social constructs humans concoct to harm their own.
In other circumstances, a white man feeding music and lyrics about black identity to an African-American woman might seem crass or, worse, inauthentic. But Tweedy and Staples are more than business partners. They’re old friends having fun doing what they love, singing and shouting and preaching about a shared humanity that overcomes the usual fault lines: age, race, class, and background. “Tweedy is a good person; his heart is right,” Staples said in 2010. “You can feel him. And I live from feel.” Their partnership models their message. The two bridge the nation’s most segregated city: Tweedy, from Chicago’s younger, whiter, middle-class North Side; and Staples from the older, blacker, poorer South Side. The album made good on its message of cross-cultural unity the moment it was conceived.
For ultimately, IAIWWB suggests that salvation lies in exactly such cooperation. “What is there to do?” the stateswoman of soul wonders on “Little Bit,” a modest rock number reminiscent of Blind Faith. “A little bit from you, a little bit from me / simple as it gets / we set each other free.” There’s “no time for crying,” except for when genuine human connection summons an occasional tear. Instead, with the stakes higher than ever before, each of us must “pull the shades off of [our] windows / to let the sun right in” and “open [our] heart to a stranger.”
Staples and Tweedy have captured in song the elusive elan vital that animates the fight for freedom and the creative process alike. It’s that rough-edged drone of suppressed energy, that distorted guitar building like a fire and exploding in harmonious, technicolor chaos. Let’s just hope Washington too can see its luminous rays.
(November 17, Anti-Records)
