Mavis Staples - We'll Never Turn Back (2007)

MP3 @ 320 kbps 











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 ad-libs 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. 







Tracklist -



      01 Down in Mississippi
      02 Eyes on the Prize
      03 We Shall Not Be Moved
      04 In the Mississippi River
      05 On My Way
      06 This Little Light of Mine
      07 99 and a Half
      08 My Own Eyes
      09 Turn Me Around
      10 We'll Never Turn Back
      11 I'll Be Rested
      12 Jesus Is on the Main Line