Chapel of love

This September it will be 70 years since Roebuck Staples took his daughters Cleotha and Mavis and his son Pervis into a studio in Chicago where, accompanied by his guitar and the piano of Evelyn Gay, they made their first recordings. Mavis had just turned 14, but the unearthly power of her voice was already transfixing congregations in the local churches where they sang. Now the only survivor of the Staple Singers, she’ll turn 84 in a few days’ time, and this week she returned to London to fill the Union Chapel to capacity two nights in a row, still growling and roaring out her message of love, still a tireless soldier in the army of her Lord.

She’s a monument, and that’s all there is to it. To attempt to “review” her would be an insult. It’s enough to say that she and her two female singers and three-piece rhythm section delivered a well chosen repertoire with vigour and warmth to a clamorously admiring and affectionate response. She spoke of the Union Chapel, a Grade 1-listed nonconformist church built in 1870s and still doing work for the homeless, isolated and dispossessed, being “home”, and that’s how it felt.

The songs she performed included beautifully minimalist versions of Norah Jones’s “Friendship” and Ike Cargill’s “Are You Sure”, and trenchant readings of Stephen Stills’s “For What It’s Worth”, Talking Heads’ “Slippery People”, Funkadelic’s “Can You Get to That” and Dottie Peoples’ “Handwriting on the Wall”. And, most of all, “Respect Yourself”, a song by Luther Ingram and Mack Rice that the Staple Singers recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama in 1971, and whose sentiments carry even greater force half a century later. If the song’s brand new day has yet to come, it’s not Mavis’s fault. As she once sang, she’ll never turn back.