The most obvious reason we love Mavis Staples, legendary member of The Staple Singers, and now one of the country’s greatest living solo artists, in that she’s coming to the Avalon on October 12.
Number 2: Mavis helped define the civil rights era with powerful anthems like “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself”.
Number 3: Mavis and her family teamed up with Martin Luther King Jr, starting in 1962, for civil rights events throughout the south.
Number 4: Mavis dated Bob Dylan. In fact, Dylan got so serious that he asked her father his permission to marry her.
Number 5: Mavis has collaborated Dylan, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Prince, Mahalia Jackson, Ry Cooder, Los Lobos, and family friend. Aretha Franklin
Number 6: She just performed at the White House. See below.
Number 7: “Let’s Do It Again,” No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart.
Number 8: Mavis paid for her 2004 album, Have a Little Faith by charging $40,000 on her credit cards.
Number 9: While making You Are Not Alone at Wilco’s studio in Chicago in January, a bundled-up Staples and backing singers including Kelly Hogan and Nora O’Connor crowded around a microphone set up in unheated stairwell to record an a cappella version of the gospel standard.
Number 10: Rolling Stone called Mavis “the most underrated diva of the century. She has an almost superhuman ability to implant the pure power of passion and emotion.”
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