Favourites : Mavis Staples : You Are Not Alone

When music websites sites started discussing the fact that Mavis Staples was recording an album with Jeff Tweedy from Wilco producing and contributing a few songs I was more than a little skeptical.

The pairing of two people whose music I really enjoy but who seemed to come from completely different ends of the spectrum was not something many people would have picked.  

First Mavis Staples, one of gospel and soul's veterans having started on the road as a 12 or 13 year old on the 50s Gospel Circuit, who with her father, Pops and brothers and sisters.  The Stape Singers laid down some of the anthems for Civil Rights Movement in the 60s, then changed their name to The Staples and combined what they called message songs and the funk of Stax and Muscle Shoals for a successful run in the 70s.    She teamed with Jeff Tweedy whose band Uncle Tupelo embodied the resurrection of  Country music in the late 1980s and who now leads Wilco an alternative country band that frequently experiments with aggressive sonics.   The only thing they really seemed to have in common was that they lived in Chicago.

Early positive reviews for once have proven to be correct and You are Not Alone Alone adds another career high point to Mavis long career.  The title song, here in a great acoustic form, written by Tweedy is a superb example of what you can expect on the album.   There is also a great cover of Creedance's Wrote a Song for Everyone.  The album has some solid reworking of gospel classics and so successfully presents an old style of music in a new way that introduces music to a new group of potential fans.  Check out Only the Lord Knows and Too Close/On My Way to Heaven.



You are Not Alone

I'll Take you there