I was on my way to my place of worship on Sunday (August 26) and the taxi driver (yes, I am a non-driving L.A. resident!) was playing the popular radio format known as “The Wave.” Over the years, it has morphed into the dumping ground for innocuous sax instrumentals, often indistinguishable from one another. There are “Wave” artists – Sade, Anita Baker, Dave Koz, Boney James, etc. – so it’s quite refreshing to hear something different. I was humming away to Patrice Rushen’s 1982 classic “Forget Me Nots” unsure what would follow…and it was, of all things, The Staple Singers perennial “I’ll Take You There”! Granted it was a Sunday morning but it seemed a strange segue. Not that I minded: I’ve been enjoying the music of this first family of gospel since their pre-Stax days. The group’s memorable reading of Stephen Stills’ message-driven “For What It’s Worth” circa 1967 was, as I recall, my introduction to the Staples since the little UK label I co-owned (Soul City Records) had actually licensed it from Epic Records for release in Britain.

It was significant that my own intro to Pops, Mavis, Yvonne, Cleotha and Pervis would come with a ‘message’ song: once signed to Stax Records in 1968, the group began recording material that for the most part continued that tradition. Their debut (produced by Steve Cropper of the MGs), “Soul Folk In Action” was awash with such – tunes like “Long Walk To DC,” “People, My People,” “Got To Be Some Changes Made” and “We’ve Got To Get Ourselves Together.” The 1970 follow-up “We’ll Get Over” had its own share of material in a similar vein: “When Will We Be Paid,” “Give A Damn,” “God Bless The Children” and “The Challenge,” all prime examples of the pointed lyrical messages that the Staples espoused.

For whatever reason, neither of these first two LPs, as good as they are, resonated sales-wise. When Stax executive Al Bell took over production for the group’s crucial third album, 1971’s “Staples Swingers” set, it was a pop-flavored cover of Bobby Broom’s “Heavy Makes You Happy” that landed the group with their first charted single.

However, it was the Staples’ fourth Stax album “Be Altitude: Respect Yourself” that took the family over the edge to mainstream international recognition. With Bell in the production seat once again, the title cut caught fire but it was the follow-up, “I’ll Take You There” that put The Staple Singers on the map and to this day, Mavis cannot perform without including the song as a required part of her repertoire.

As I was listening to “I’ll Take You There” that Sunday morning, I was struck by a couple of things: firstly, the fact that the Stax promotion machine had done such an incredible job with the record in 1972 that it actually topped the pop and R&B charts, an amazing feat given the perception of The Staples as a ‘gospel’ team!

Then, as I whistled along, I became aware of the highly improvisational nature of the track itself. I don’t know if the original template for the Al Bell-composed tune called for Mavis to give shout outs to the musicians on the recording (“Barry, play your, play your piano, now” she calls out to, we assume, Barry Beckett, before asking her ‘Daddy’ to join in before exhorting ‘little David,’ the uncredited bass player at the Muscle Shoals studio to ‘play on it’!). It is in fact a soulful jam with the added element of the call-and-response church tradition with which the Staples were intimately familiar. If you really listen, the song has little formal structure: it was its non-stop groove and upbeat message (of promised salvation) that ensured that the song would be indelibly etched into the public consciousness, reprised years later by BeBe & CeCe Winans and used in all manner of soundtracks for television and film.

It may been an odd choice for ‘The Wave’ but it sure set my day off to a good start…have mercy!

David Nathan
Aka the British Ambassador Of Soul
Owner, www.soulmusic.com, www.soulmusicstore.com

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