The
Staple Singers: Uncloudy Day (Charly CPCD 8087)
Some instrumentalists carve their way into our souls,
not by raw skill but by creating a sound world of surpassing
richness and integrity. A tone, a mode of phrasing, and
- more recently - also via their particular incorporation
of an electronic effect...although, in this case, the
effect was electrical - rather than electronic - and built
into most amplifiers. Yes...I’m talking about tremelo,
here - tremelo and Pop Staples. Seldom were two so well-matched...
Pop Staples still leads the Staple Singers, his daughters
and he form a breathtakingly beautiful vocal group...and
yet, the frame, the ground on which they stand are Pop’s
elegantly simple filigrees, shimmering around a guitar
style purely Mississippi hill country in its soul. At
their most driven, his chuntering rhythms recall another
great son of those climes, Mississippi Fred McDowall,
with a lean Lightnin’ rockabilly touch. But - mostly
- he throbs...and revealed something then new in the world
- a way of accentuating the space in blues playing, which
has influenced just about every electric guitarist to
follow him. Mentioning no names, now - but John Fogarty,
in particular, absorbed this lesson whole, albeit he’d
be the last to deny that one/not to mention the burr he
got from Mavis...so evident on “I Had a Dream”...
Pop learned guitar from Charlie Patton, too - no kidding
- albeit he never recorded before the mid-fifties, with
the family group. And this beautiful selection picks the
finest of that fifties work, a counterpart to rock’n’roll
of the day that was to have enormous influence in the
bastard tradition. Pops’ guitar throbs, the singers
soar & rock, the sometime drummer locks in minimal
mode...and the weirdest thing, it’s as if we had
aready heard this...so much has it influenced.
Perhaps my favourite is “Will the Circle be Unbroken”
- touched as it is by Pop’s gentle lead vocal (unadorned
on the verses) - although the archetypical space of “Uncloudy
Day” itself, their first gospel hit, is far, far
too hard to go past...not to mention the cooly-rockin’
“Going Away”, or the one the Stones borrowed
“It May Be the Last Time”... And what of the
undiluted reach of “So Soon”?
(or, indeed, the almost seven minutes of “I’m
Coming Home”...an antiphonal heaven, by any estimation)
Influence, indeed, be damned. Cause the reason you need
to hear this are legion...and “influence” comes
well down the list. The Staples, at their peak, created
one of the great musics, complete in itself, which amply
demands your attention, irrespective of their formative
role on later musics. Just try...
John Henry Calvinist
