In recent years, Mavis Staples has found a way to be a mature artist in the sunset of a career (hopefully, early in that sunset). She figured out how to be relevant without sacrificing who she is; on We’ll Never Turn Back (produced by Ry Cooder) and 2004’s stripped-down Have a Little Faith, she found musical contexts that obscure or thematize her age—she doesn’t have the range she once had—and make those contexts the strengths of the albums.

 

Here she sings a song cycle about the Civil Rights Movement, singing the songs that were the soundtrack for the movement, introducing them with the personal “Down in Mississippi,” which briefly recounted her experience with segregation as a child. Staples and Cooder treat these songs as contemporary, with looped percussion giving them a fresh motor and some surprisingly deep grooves, but it is her vocal performance that makes the album come to life.

 

With chuckles, grunts, spoken sentences and wailed lines, Staples sounds like a real person talking to you through song, and even if you don’t believe every word of every story, you believe they’re true enough. More importantly, you know how real the songs and the emotions are to her.

 

Cooder’s gently contemporary production and the timing of Staples’ project suggest songs such as “We Shall Overcome” and “Eyes on the Prize” have relevance today. In light of Katrina, challenges to African-American voters in Florida and the fact that African-Americans are in the minority in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, they have a point.