Music
Mavis Staples’ vibrant Sad and Beautiful World – her first solo album in six years – shows the octogenarian singer has lost none of her passion for justice. By Daniel Herborn.
Mavis Staples’ Sad and Beautiful World is a plea for compassion
When Mavis Staples recorded “Human Mind”, a song written for her by friends and admirers Allison Russell and Hozier, the octogenarian R’n’B and gospel singer felt it may be her swan song. Moved to tears by the song’s message of grace and perseverance in trying times, she felt it encapsulated her career in a way that would make a fitting full stop.
Yet that recording session flowed so smoothly it seemed a shame not to keep rolling. Producer Brad Cook booked another session, then another, and the building momentum snowballed into Sad and Beautiful World, Staples’ first solo record in six years and 14th overall.
Few musicians have traversed such an epic path of American musical and political history as Staples. She first joined her family band, The Staple Singers, in 1950, taking lead vocals as a pre-teen. Unable to stay in hotels or eat in restaurants in the Jim Crow South, they crisscrossed the nation, defiantly singing songs of hope in the face of naked hostility and police harassment.
Expanding their itinerary from churches to clubs, they became key figures in the protest music movement, covering protest songs and writing their own, such as 1965’s “Freedom Highway”, written as a rallying call for the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. They became part of the unofficial soundtrack of the civil rights movement, both inspiring and taking inspiration from activist Martin Luther King Jr, who played their songs before his rallies.
They also had a foot in the folk camp. One curly-haired troubadour who crossed paths with the band was so enamoured of a young Mavis, whose voice sounded to him “the most mysterious thing I’d ever heard”, that he proposed. She later hid from the singer at the Apollo Theater to avoid having to turn him down a second time. He was nothing if not a determined suitor, that young Bob Dylan, though any hurt feelings didn’t stop him from championing Staples’ work and duetting with her onstage.
By 1972 the group had achieved rare crossover appeal for a gospel act, topping the Billboard Hot 100 with “I’ll Take You There”. While Staples’ voice, so velvety and expressive, would seem trend-proof, she fell out of fashion in subsequent decades. As if to prove F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are no second acts in American lives, an attempt by Prince to revive her stalled career foundered when he clashed with his record company.
Staples drifted further from the industry’s mainstream before a second comeback took. She teamed with long-time admirer Jeff Tweedy for 2010’s You Are Not Alone, a collection of songs tailored to her expressive voice and moral authority, which returned her to relevance. Subsequent albums produced by Tweedy, M. Ward and Ben Harper re-established her alongside Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris as the rare singer able to remake even canonical songs as her own.
This history informs and enriches, but never constrains, Sad and Beautiful World – a collection that reaches across decades and genres to present a rich and vibrant affirmation of humanity and a plea for compassion. Nine of its 10 songs are covers, including the opener, Tom Waits’ “Chicago” – all clattering instrumentation, three guitars hurtling down separate paths and intersecting with Matt Douglas’s squalling sax. Here Staples sings at the rawer end of her register, the mode rapper Chuck D called “gospel rough”, giving full-throated voice to the promise of a better life.
More often these songs achieve a balm-like effect, such as the mellow “Hard Times” by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. In Staples’ hands, a bluegrass song apparently perfect in its skeletal beauty becomes fleshed out with warmly swelling organ and tasteful slide guitar, her voice rising and dissipating like gentle waves. The song’s composed but firm assertion that “Hard times ain’t gonna rule my mind no more” feels like hard-won wisdom.
Staples’ search for spirit-rousing songs extends far and wide, like “Everybody Needs Love”, a sweet and straightforward song by Eddie Hinton, best known as part of the legendary country and soul inflected Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
Similarly, the title track, via neo-psychedelia genius Sparklehorse, is as simple – and as indelible – as a lullaby, elevated by the sympathetic production, which swathes Staples’ vocals in reverb, the aural equivalent of a lobster poached in butter.
While Sad and Beautiful World assembles a who’s who of folk-leaning indie rock (Waxahatchee, Kara Jackson, MJ Lenderman and Bon Iver among them), Staples’ vocals remain at the forefront, with the guest players content to add grace notes and texture.
The focus is very much on the words and the message they convey. Having unsuccessfully lobbied contemporaries such as Smokey Robinson and Gladys Knight to lend their considerable talents to what she called “freedom songs”, Staples has always favoured a plain-spoken brand of protest song in the vein of The Staple Singers’ “Why? (Am I Treated So Bad)”.
This new collection feels carefully curated to play to her strengths of directness and clarity, with the likes of the elegant “We Got To Have Peace”, originally sung by Curtis Mayfield. A kindred musical spirit who once lived in the same South Chicago block as Staples, Mayfield was peerless at fusing activism with joy in his music. Written in response to the ongoing Vietnam War, his lyrics here feel both timeless and sadly timely: “We got to have peace / To keep the world alive and war to cease.”
Kevin Morby’s hymnal “Beautiful Strangers” is cut from a similar cloth and is the kind of weighty statement that takes serious gravitas to pull off. It pays tribute to Freddie Gray, a young African–American man who died of spinal cord injuries while in police custody in Baltimore in 2015 and whose death sparked mass protests. Later, it revives the rallying call “Pray for Paris”, as it reflects on the 2015 terrorist attacks in the French capital that killed 137 people. The lyrics don’t flinch in the face of unimaginable tragedy but call for radical acceptance: “If I die too young,” Staples sings, “Or if the gunmen come, I’m full of love.”
That resilience animates the aforementioned “Human Mind” – a kind of sequel to Hozier’s “Nina Cried Power”, a stirring tribute to activists. It reckons with the psychological toll of speaking out about injustice and cruelty, but it evolves into a vow to keep fighting: “God bless the human mind, find a reason, Lord, to keep on trying / With every tear you cry, you find good in it sometimes.” While it may have been a fitting final bow, it’s better as another link in an unbroken chain, a powerful plea to keep on keeping on.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 8, 2025 as "Rousing the soul".
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