Mavis Staples of the legendary gospel-soul group The Staple Singers is back with a new album, "We'll Never Turn Back" on the Anti label that also resurrected soul legends Solomon Burke and Bettye LaVette. The album is an assemblage of protest songs and features Ry Cooder, Jim Keltner, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The May issue of Mojo gives it four stars.

>> 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 adlibs 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. If her album is musically uneven at times, her artistry and strength continue to shine as undimmed beacons. <<

A video interview with Mavis, audio samples and a complete tracklisting are available at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000MR8SZU?tag ... DFTB1QH7F&

Looks great.

I agree, great cover.

Great cd. I picked this up a couple of weeks ago.

I agree.I got this yesterday. After one listen, it sounds real good. Mavis sings as well as she ever has, and the arrangements are real nice.
Mavis has long been my favorite soul/gospel singer, and this does not disappoint.

Mavis deserves to be more well known than she is. She has been a part of a great body of work, whether solo or with the Staple Singers or on her many guest appearances.