Mavis Staples Is an American Institution. She’s Not Done Singing Yet.
The New York Times
After more than seven decades onstage, the gospel and soul great decided last year that it was time to retire. Then she realized she still had work to do.
On a rainy April day in Chicago, Mavis Staples sat in the restaurant of the towering downtown Chicago building where she’s lived for the past four years. For two hours, she talked about the civil rights movement and faith. And finally, she mentioned her old flame Bob Dylan.
The singer-songwriter first proposed to Staples after a kiss at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival; she hid from him during a show at the Apollo decades later, fearing he’d ask again. They’ve remained friends, even taking daily strolls during a 2016 tour together. She’d heard rumors he would soon retire, finally wrapping his fabled Never Ending Tour. Staples knew he would hate it.
“Oh, Bobby: He gotta keep on singing,” Staples said. “I could handle it more than him. I will call him and say, ‘Don’t retire, Bobby. You don’t know what you’re doing.’”
Staples speaks from experience: Late in the summer of 2023, soon after turning 84, she told her manager she was done. She’d been on the road for 76 years, ever since her father, Roebuck Staples, known as Pops, assembled a family band when she was 8. The Staple Singers became a gospel fulcrum of the civil rights movement and, later, a force for bending genres — mixing funk, rock and soul inside their spiritual mission, an all-American alchemy. The band’s mightiest singer and sole survivor since the death of her sister Yvonne in 2018 and brother, Pervis, in 2021, Mavis remained in high demand, a historical treasure commanding a thunderous contralto.
“Being an American and not believing in royalty, meeting her was the closest I’d ever felt,” said Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who marveled at her while watching “The Last Waltz” decades before he produced a string of her poignant albums. “I felt the same way when I met Johnny Cash, like meeting a dollar bill or bald eagle.”
A seemingly indomitable extrovert, Staples had deeply resented being homebound during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. So she returned to the road with gusto, playing more than 50 shows last summer. But in July, she missed the end of a moving walkway in Germany and fell on her face. Was this, she wondered, the life she wanted? She’d previously mentioned retirement, but now she insisted.
In the months leading up to the election, Donald J. Trump sat for a slew of casual and unconventional conversations with podcasters and streamers. We watched them all.
In the last year, museums, book festivals, arts journals and other organizations have experienced bitter discord over what qualifies as tolerable speech about the conflict and its combatants.
John Krasinski may not have the raw energy of Glen Powell, but a collaboration with the stylist Ilaria Urbinati has paid huge dividends.
The star of Jacques Audiard’s showy new musical about a trans Mexican crime boss, Karla Sofía Gascón, adds soul to the melodrama. Zoe Saldaña also shines.
The powerhouse soprano, already a company stalwart at 37, still seems to be figuring out a character whose moods change on a dime.
The artist’s works are the subject of two New York shows, at the Metropolitan Museum and the Jack Shainman Gallery.
The YouTube star has a coffee company, a podcast and a new collaboration with Warby Parker. One thing she isn’t doing much? Posting.
The FX series strives to capture the complexity of its subject: the long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.
Nora Holt was a pioneer of Chicago’s Black classical music scene. A friend of Josephine Baker, she later became a blues singer in Parisian nightclubs.
In the film “Conclave,” the costume designer Lisy Christl clothed an army of catty cardinals, from their miters down to their quirky glasses.
The sprawling PST festival of more than 70 exhibitions doesn’t quite live up to its theme of art and science colliding. But there is a handful of impressive entries.