On Sunday, June 8, I sat in a gentle rain at the Chicago Blues Festival with thousands of others, waiting for Mavis Staples to take the stage. At 85, Staples is an icon, with songs that include “Why? (Am I Treated So Bad),” “For What It’s Worth,” “Freedom Highway” and “Long Walk To D.C.” As part of The Staple Singers, she helped provide the soundtrack for the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the long Black Freedom Struggle. We must see legends like Staples while they are still with us. We are losing so many of them so fast.
The Staples Singers' music helped people keep marching when it was hard. Those songs taught lessons about how to resist the terror of Jim and Jane Crow and its many forms of evil; they were a literal cadence for people to march toward justice, and they reflect the centrality of music to Black Americans as a source of cultural resistance, struggle, triumph and joy in the face of oppression. As Cornel West said in a 2012 interview, "The blues is an autobiographical chronicle of a personal catastrophe expressed lyrically and endured with grace and dignity. Meaning what? Meaning that the blues are all those who are willing to look unflinchingly at catastrophic conditions.”
