Mavis Staples born 10 July 1939

Staples was born in Chicago, Illinois. She began her career with her family group in 1950. Initially singing locally at churches and appearing on a weekly radio show, the Staples scored a hit in 1956 with "Uncloudy Day" for the Vee-Jay label. When Mavis graduated from what is now Paul Robeson High School in 1957, The Staple Singers took their music on the road. Led by family patriarch Roebuck "Pops" Staples on guitar and including the voices of Mavis and her siblings Cleotha, Yvonne, and Pervis, the Staples were called "God's Greatest Hitmakers". She had aspirations of becoming a nurse, but her father persuaded her to stay with the group, which recorded several gospel hits by the early 1960s. The Staple Singers’ transition to soul and rhythm and blues began in the late 1960s, when they signed with Stax Records—the same label on which Staples recorded her solo debut, Mavis Staples, in 1969.

 Her second solo effort, Only for the Lonely (1970), included the hit “I Have Learned to Do Without You,” but it was the Staple Singers’ string of Top 40 hits in the 1970s that made Staples and her family true pop stars. Her solo albums of the late 1970s and ’80s did not fare well as she experimented unsuccessfully with disco and electro-pop. Time Waits for No One (1989) and The Voice (1993), despite critics’ praise, also failed to prosper, and Staples’s struggle to find a suitable outlet for her music continued.

In 1996 she recorded Spirituals and Gospel: Dedicated to Mahalia Jackson in honour of Jackson, a close friend and role model. Staples curtailed her musical activity as her father’s health declined in the late 1990s. Her first recordings after his death in December 2000 were collaborations with other artists, including Bob Dylan and Los Lobos. Her duet with Dylan, “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” (2003), was nominated for a Grammy Award.

In 2004 Staples returned to the studio to record Have a Little Faith as a tribute to her father, whose influence—musical, parental, and spiritual—was everywhere evident on the album. Included on it was Staples’s rendition of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a favourite of her father’s, as well as “Pops Recipe,” which incorporated in its lyrics biographical details from the elder Staples’s life and cherished examples of his fatherly advice.

Her return to form was further confirmed by We’ll Never Turn Back (2007). Featuring guest performances by Ry Cooder and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, this collection of reinvented gospel classics played brilliantly to the strengths of Staples’s voice and Cooder’s guitar. Although her live performances were legendary, she had never released a concert album prior to Hope at the Hideout (2008), recorded at a small venue in her hometown of Chicago.

Staples’s set list, grounded in civil rights anthems and freedom songs, could function as a sort of short course in African American history over the previous half century, and the concert album’s title, which echoed one of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign slogans, and its release date (November 4, 2008, the day of the presidential election) indicate that Staples considered herself a witness to history.

In 2010 Staples released You Are Not Alone, a collection of gospel standards and new songs that was produced by Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy. It was a critical success, and the following year Staples’s long Grammy drought finally came to an end when You Are Not Alone was awarded the Grammy Award for best Americana album. Her subsequent albums included One True Vine (2013) and If All I Was Was Black (2017), both of which were produced by Tweedy. A rendition of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” from Staples’s 2015 EP Your Good Fortune, won a Grammy for best American roots performance. She received a Kennedy Center Honour in 2016.

In May 2019, Staples celebrated her 80th birthday with a concert at the Apollo Theater, 63 years after first appearing at the theater as a teenager with her family band, the Staple Singers, in 1956. The show, which featured special guest artists, including David Byrne and Norah Jones, is one of a series of collaborative concerts she staged in May to commemorate her 80th birthday. She also performed at the 2019 Glastonbury Festival.

 (Edited from Britannica & Wikipedia)