Mavis Staples: Soul-gospel great still takes you there

October 14, 9:09 AMSF Music ExaminerDerk Richardson

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Mavis Staples

In 1972, when Mavis Staples' incredibly sultry voice came snaking and beckoning out of car radio speakers on the Staples Singers hit, "I'll Take You There," it didn't matter what destination she was singing about, you wanted to go.

Then, some time in early 1990s, after the release of one of the two solo albums produced by Prince, a train-wreck of a show at the Great American Music Hall made me wonder if I wanted to go anywhere near a Mavis Staples concert again.

Fortunately, Staples performed at the High Sierra Music Festival in July 2007, during a tour to support her powerful Ry Cooder–produced CD We'll Never Turn Back. I couldn't believe it was the same performer who had been so tentative and seemingly disoriented at the San Francisco club gig, where Staples had seemed totally out of synch with her band and her material, making repeated references to the fact that Pops - her dad, Staples Singers patriarch Roebuck "Pops" Staples - wasn't there to anchor the performance.

Well, some time during the interceding years, during which Pops left this mortal coil (in 2000), Mavis regained her bearings. (Read Joel Selvin's 2004 profile of her here.) Her performance at High Sierra, on the main stage in the late afternoon, with a band that rode a small rhythm section and featured a brother and sister among the three gospel-style harmony and call-and-response background singers, was as confident, soulful, gleeful, and incendiary as one could have hoped for.

The material, rife with the "message" songs of We'll Never Turn Back, in keeping with the Staples tradition of fusing the spiritual and the secular ("When Will We Be Paid?," "For What It's Worth," "Respect Yourself"), was inspirational, to say the least, and Staples' charismatic presence underscored Prince's praise of her as "the epitome of soul" and made it seem impossible that she was 67 years old at the time.

So it's without reservation that I single out Staples' San Francisco Jazz Festival show Wednesday night (Oct. 15) at the Palace of Fine Arts as the first pick of this year's long-running star-studded fest. The Palace of Fine Arts has a big stage, but it won't be big enough to contain the kind of energy Staples is capable of unleashing.