Mavis Staples

Artist's Website

For over fifty years, Mavis Staples has been a national treasure, working her vocal magic on the highways and byways of gospel, folk and soul music. With both her family group, the Staple Singers, and as a solo artist in her own right she has helped to define much of what is righteous and soulful in American music. In the early 1960s, the Staple Singers began to work with Dr. Martin Luther King singing in support of the Civil Rights movement.

Mavis Staples, a Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee, recently completed work on We’ll Never Turn Back, the most personal and polemical album of her career. We’ll Never Turn Back combines raw, emotional, contemporized versions of some of the freedom songs that provided the soundtrack to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, along with other traditional songs, and new originals written by Mavis and producer Ry Cooder.