Album art. Photo: Luaka Bop.
‘The Time for Peace is Now: Gospel music about us’ – Various Artists
Review by Joseph Jones
When Pops Staples first got his family together to sing it was at his brother’s church. It was 1948, with all that meant for a black musical group in the USA, even one touring churches: segregation, harrassment and worse. But one of those churches was Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Martin Luther King Jnr was pastor. ‘When we heard Doctor King preach, we went back to the motel and had a meeting,’ said Mavis Staples, The Staple Singers’ leading voice. ‘Pops said, “Now if he can preach it, we can sing it.”’ They certainly could.
The emancipatory logic of the gospel was a perfect fit for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. It abounded in King’s speeches, in the imagination of a just world in which freedom is the extension of the kingdom of heaven to all people. For Pops Staples this became the uplifting march anthem ‘Freedom Highway’ but also the earth-bound ‘Why (Am I Treated So Bad)?’
The Staple Singers were popular enough to brave a hostile touring environment. But other acts found it much tougher. And even when they found appreciative audiences, touring conditions were inappropriate for some gospel artists. Albert Floyd, of the Floyd Family Singers, says on the sleeve notes to this collection that ‘We could have made a career out of it but, when I was out there, I saw so much stuff that I didn’t want my children to ever become involved with it, so I just kind of pulled back from it.’ This record is made up of groups like his. It is glorious.
Of course, some singers were as comfortable in the club on a Saturday night as in the pulpit the following morning. And this joyous record is full of secular pick-ups from funk and soul – witness ‘Keep Your Faith To The Sky’ by Willie Scott and the Birmingham Spirituals. But commercial success was a different matter, and much of this music has been unavailable until now. There isn’t a single famous artist here, but every one of them would have deserved it. Groups like these were kept going by strong families and church communities rather than major labels – something you can perhaps hear in the optimism and lack of showbiz cant.
Something, too, you can hear in the singing. The advertising blurb suggests gospel songs that go easy on the religion. But while there is plenty of easy-access solidarity and harmony, the context is undeniably biblical: ‘Have you heard about Jesus? He was angered / Men carrying scaring or robbing people / He and John reached their hands out ... He can be here right now’. Or take the Gospel IQ’s ‘Peace in the Land’: ‘Are you doing the best you can / In this world so full of sin? Are you treating your neighbour right / Because if not you’ll take a ride.’ The Staples Jr Singers (unrelated but named for Pops) go straight for the Beatitudes. This isn’t flower-powered politics, it’s righteousness. ‘Music as permanently strong and meaningful of this doesn’t come from nowhere, says author Jonathan Lethem on the cover. ‘It comes from the opposite of nowhere’. Can I hear an Amen?
