She Knows a Place

Read this one with your earbuds in. Sophie Abramowitz gives a close listen to Mavis Staples, studying the movement of the legendary singer’s voice through an album’s worth of tracks, from her transformative a capella rendition of “Stand By Me” through “You Are Not Alone,” her collaboration with Wilco bandleader Jeff Tweedy. Staples, whose family soundtracked the US civil rights movement, is a powerhouse who knows how to dissolve her voice into the choir. Abramowitz does real justice to her range, thoughtfully attuned throughout to Staples’s “presence in the permeable foreground—a player in a human drama, not its only star.”

The performance stands out in Mavis’s career, but by troubling the opposition between background and lead, chorus and soloist, Mavis was doing what she has done since she first performed professionally onstage (as a child, standing on a chair to reach her microphone). Like most soul, doo-wop, R&B, and Motown artists, she started singing in her local church, where soloists often move in and out of the choir. In Greek theater, one function of the chorus is to link the stage and the seats, responding to and occasionally guiding the drama. The gospel choir is connective in its own way: its singers are also congregants, people who stand onstage and sit in the pews. Much popular music reverses this formation. It’s the frontman, the soloist, the lead who reaches into the audience’s hearts, the other vocalists harmonizing behind them. Mavis’s singing suggests a more horizontal mode of musical creation, even when she’s at the front of the stage herself.