We'll Never Turn Back

Mavis Staples

Product Details

• Audio CD (April 24, 2007)
• Original Release Date: April 24, 2007
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Anti
• ASIN: B000MR8SZU
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #20,988 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

As musical activists in the 1960s civil rights movement, the Staple Singers were powerful voices for equality and change. And more than 40 years after Pops's daughter Mavis spent a night in a West Memphis, Arkansas, jail at the behest of a racist cop, she still remembers the terror of the experience, as well as the counsel of Dr. Martin Luther King. That episode is at the centerpiece of "My Own Eyes," one of the most moving offerings on this collection of songs of racial struggle in the '50s and '60s, produced by guitarist Ry Cooder and featuring backing from the original Freedom Singers and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Throughout, the album proves both emotionally chilling and spiritually uplifting. On J.B. Lenoir's "Down in Mississippi" and Marshall Jones's "In the Mississippi River," for example, Cooder makes fine use of pounding percussion and snaky electric guitar to capture the danger and fear inherent in the Deep South at the time, while the title song and "Jesus Is on the Main Line" draw on gospel and the traditional framework of church hymns to promise positive solutions. Staples, who adlibs on several cuts, connecting the injustice of yesterday to the continuing marginalization of blacks in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, remains a remarkable performer, employing a throaty sensuality that rises from a deep well of tremulous emotion. If her album is musically uneven at times, her artistry and strength continue to shine as undimmed beacons. --Alanna Nash

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Product Description

From the liner notes, by John Lewis:

When I listen to this music, it takes me back. It takes me back to the red clay hills of Georgia, to the Black Belt of Alabama, and the Delta of Mississippi. It takes me back to the moans and groans and pains of an oppressed people yearning for freedom. It takes me back to the time when hundreds and thousands of us decided we were "sick and tired of being sick and tired," as Fannie Lou Hamer said. It takes me back to the days when ordinary people inspired by a dream decided to quench our hunger and thirst for justice in the fountains of mercy and love.

Back then, some people thought legalized segregation in America would never come to an end. But those of us in the Civil Rights Movement were inspired by a higher calling. And even if it cost us our very lives, "we weren't gone to let nobody turn us `round". We believed that the action of peace, the way of non-violence, and the power of love could overcome our oppression and remind our oppressors of their own humanity. Through the power of this faith our nation witnessed a non-violent revolution of values, a revolution of ideas that changed America forever.

The music you are listening to right now was the soul of that revolution. It was this music that gave us hope when it seemed like all hope was gone. It was the heartbeat of this music and its steady, reassuring message that bound us together as one solid force. So when we were beaten, arrested and jailed; when we stood together on picket lines or marched through the streets of the Deep South; when we faced the guns drawn, the billy clubs and the bullwhips raised; when we were teargassed, trampled by horses, or scattered by fire hoses, it was these songs that lifted us and pushed us to a higher place.

It is my hope that when you hear Mavis Staples, when you hear the Freedom Singers, and the other artists on this CD, that you too will be inspired. I hope this music will help you find the courage to stand up, speak up, and speak out and answer the call of your own conscience. It is my hope that this music will help you see what ordinary people with extraordinary vision can do when they decide they will never turn back.

Rep. John Lewis

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mavis at her best -- and that's SAYIN' somethin'., May 11, 2007

By	Larry D (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

I almost wish I could think of something negative to say about this album, just to be different. But it is transcendent. No longer the angel-voiced young girl of her early years in gospel or the sassy soul sister of the "Respect Yourself" days, Mavis is a mature woman who's seen a lot in her 60-odd years ("With My Own Eyes"). Her burnished contralto is all mid-range and lows, but if the instrument itself isn't what it once was, like Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and more recently Joni Mitchell, what's lost in vocal range is more than made up for in expressiveness and nuance. No filler here, every cut is a gem. My two favorite moments in an album filled with great moments: Mavis' spoken anecdote about inadvertently integrating a Mississippi "wash-a-teria" in "Down in Mississippi" (it had been a long while since I'd last heard the term "wash-a-teria" -- that's laundromat for those of you who don't know the South); and in "I'll Be Rested", her personal vision of heaven, a combination gospel jam session and civil rights movement reunion including Dr. King and Emmett Till, Clara Ward and Marion Williams, and Mavis' own father, Pops Staples, guitar in hand. Mavis has been one of my favorite singers since the Staple Singers' epochal "Hammer and Nails" album back in 1962 (Is that album EVER going to be released on CD?); and my only hope is that this amazing collection brings Mavis a bit of the popular acclaim she so richly deserves. Better forty-five years late than never.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A recording that a Mavis, Ry, Staples, gospel or blues fan should NOT be without, May 5, 2007

By	Michael B. Wiseman (Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a recording of a once in a lifetime music/magic/spiritual collaboration between one of the great voices of the past 50 years in gospel/pop/blues and one of the great guitarists in blues/rock/world beat.
There was magic when Mavis sang with her Dad, Pops; one of the great guitar influences on rock and blues. With all due respect, there's just as much going on here; only new and different.
Pop's songwriting, guitar and voice were shoulders that Bob Dylan ("If I had a Hammer"/"Wish I had Answered") the Stones ("May be the Last Time", "Shana boom boom") and Ry himself stood upon along with everyone else who was influenced by them.
There's something greater here than just the sum of the artists talents before they made this recording. Something came out of this collaboration that was great, in and of itself. Listen to the clips on here and you'll hear it.
This is as good as any record I've ever heard. The best.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why slot this into a narrow category? This is, simply, greatness, April 30, 2007

By	Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

If you're of a certain age, this CD is an invitation to time-travel back to the 1960s. Not the `60s of war protest. Or the `60s of sex, drugs and music. This is the `60s that came before that, when Bob Dylan was too young to shave, and Southern blacks stood up to fire hoses, and white kids rushed South to stand and die with them. Freedom. Equality. "Black and white together." That long ago, oh so innocent time.

I try not to go back there. It's too depressing. As with so many issues, my generation made a promise and kept about half of it. And the result is that for all the "progress" that's been made, not a single one of us would trade our troubles to be poor and black in rural Mississippi.

So let's go to the music. Roebuck "Pops" Staples was Bob Dylan when Dylan was still Zimmerman --- from the earliest days of the Civil Rights Movement, his lyrics thundered from the mountain like Martin Luther King's sermons. And his music was irresistible. Pops wrote songs that, along with his stinging guitar, made you want to jump up to testify with your body. And in his daughter Mavis, he had an incomparable asset: a gospel shouter with the firepower of Aretha Franklin.

To hear the Staple Singers was to know that there wasn't anybody who would turn you `round. That it's a slow train, but it's definitely moving on. That like a tree planted by the water we shall not be moved.

Now Mavis Staples has revisited that music. And the dozen songs she's selected for "We'll Never Turn Back," make for the most passionate CD of her long career. To hear them is to be wrenched from the present to her childhood in Mound Bayou, Mississippi:"Every Sunday we would go to church, And this church --- a little wooden church up on the hill, no organist, no piano, no music and when you sang, you would hear feet patting on that wooden floor and people clapping their hands --- this church had such a good sound. Makes you move, you know? Because it has Soul in it, the spirit of the people."

If you don't listen too closely, here's your smart choice for the gospel purchase of the year. But why slot this into a narrow category? The producer is Ry Cooder, and there hasn't been someone as sensitive to ethnic music at the controls since the glory days of Atlantic and Stax. So "We'll Never Turn Back" is not just great gospel --- it's also a fantastic soul CD. And, with "99 and ½," it offers a dance cut that could give even a bigot visions of three hundred million Americans jiving to glory.

But this is much more than archival music enjoying brilliant production. It's a blunt attack on all the racism that endures. The day this CD was released, I read an article about health --- or lack of it --- in Mississippi. This is a state with the highest infant-mortality rate in America. More teen pregnancies than any other state. And improvement isn't likely. When Haley Barbour, former Chairman of the Republican National Committee, became Governor in 2004, he promised to cut Medicaid. He has succeeded; 54,000 non-elderly Mississippi residents --- most of them children --- were removed from Medicaid in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years.

Mavis Staples sings bluntly about politicians and their lies, about promises broken and justice denied. She names the martyrs. And she doesn't tolerate dissent: This is, she says, what I've seen with my own eyes.

The ultimate greatness of this CD is that it acknowledges hardship but refuses to submit to it. The music's so strong and her voice is so thrilling you really feel there's an inevitability to the cause of equality. And if you doubt that, there's no way to refute her faith. "This joy I have - the world didn't give it to me," Mavis Staples has said. Believe it.