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Mavis Staples Biography
Mavis Staples is an American rhythm and blues and gospel singer, actress, and civil rights activist. She has recorded and performed with her family’s band The Staple Singers, and also as a solo artist.
Staples was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Blues Hall of Fame in 2017.
Mavis Staples Age
Mavis was born on 10 July 1939, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America. She is 79 years old as of now.
Mavis Staples Photo
Mavis Staples Married
Staples was briefly married to Spencer Leak in 1964; they divorced when Staples would not end her music career to stay home. She has no children. In the 2015 documentary Mavis! she reveals that Bob Dylan once proposed to her, and she turned him down.
Mavis Staples Career
In her seventies, gospel-R&B legend Mavis Staples has emerged as perhaps the hardest-working singer of her generation, releasing more albums of original material over the past decade (five, and counting) than even her famously prolific contemporary Willie Nelson. Beginning with the rebirth of 2010’s You Are Not Alone, Staples has cycled through a series of taste-making producers (Jeff Tweedy, M Ward) and a host of younger songwriters to create material that fits her prophetic voice.
On her new album, We Get By, Ben Harper serves as Staples’ newest collaborator, writing and producing a series of defiant declarations of peace, justice, and heartbreak. From the charging electric blues of “Change” to the modern soul protest of “Brothers and Sisters,” Staples further refines the type of socially conscious artistry she rediscovered on 2017’s If All I Was Was Black, in the wake of horrors like Charlottesville and Trump’s child-separation policy.
But Staples, who lost her sister Yvonne last year, is at her best here when she’s exposing a rare vulnerability or further bolstering (and commenting on) her own mythology. Folk ballads like “Heavy on My Mind” and “Never Needed Anyone” finds the singer bruised and bleeding with grief as she wrestles with loss and loneliness. “Now all that we are,” she moans on the former, “is the living ghost of our youth.”
When she’s not mourning, Staples doubles down on the type of communal love and faith-preaching that have been her trademarks ever since she served as the lead vocalist of Staple Singers classics like “Respect Yourself” and “Freedom Highway.” “We Get By” is a convincing anthem of persistence sung as a duet with Harper. “Anytime,” meanwhile, finds the singer relishing her own success and survival: “I’m rock, paper scissors,” she sings with piercing emphasis, “and I’m bound to win.”
But it’s not until the closing track, “One More Change,” that Staples’ indefatigable spirit shines through most clearly. The song is a late-in-life mission statement for an artist who’s spent her career espousing radical positivity and collective action. “Believing too deep to not have faith,” Staples sings, sounding determined in her twilight offering, so much so that the very act of singing the song fulfills the righteous promise laid out in its full-hearted chorus: “But I’ve got just one more change to make.”
Mavis Staples Net Worth
Staples is an American gospel and rhythm and blues singer, actress, and civil rights activist who has a net worth of $6 million.
Mavis Staples Film and Tv
During her career, Staples has appeared in many films and television shows, including The Last Waltz, Graffiti Bridge, Wattstax, New York Undercover, Songs of Praise, Soul Train, Soul to Soul, The Psychiatrist, and The Cosby Show. Staples performed the title theme song for 1989’s National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Mavis!, the first feature documentary about Staples and the Staple Singers, directed by Jessica Edwards, had its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2015.Mavis! screened in theaters and was broadcast on HBO in February 2016.
On September 8, 2015, Staples was a featured performer on the premiere episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, during which Stephen Colbert thanked her personally for appearing. On June 15, 2019, Staples appeared as the featured musical guest on the CBS This Morning “Saturday Sessions” segment, where she played songs from her newest release, We Get By.
Mavis Staples Awards
- In 1999, The Staple Singers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Lauryn Hill.
- In 2005, Mavis and the Staple Singers were honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
- Mavis Staples is a recipient of a 2006 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States’ highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.
- On February 13, 2011, Staples won her first Grammy award in the category for Best Americana Album for You Are Not Alone. In her acceptance speech, a shocked and crying Staples said: “This has been a long time coming”.
- On May 7, 2011, Staples was awarded an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
- On May 6, 2012, Staples was awarded an honorary doctorate and performed “I’ll Take You There” with current and graduating students at Columbia College Chicago’s 2012 Commencement Exercise in Chicago, Illinois at the historic Chicago Theatre.
- Staples was recognized as a 2016 Kennedy Center Honoree at the 39th annual gala event held in Washington, D.C.
- In 2017, Staples was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.
Mavis Staples Albums
- Mavis Staples (1969)
- Only for the Lonely (1970)
- Oh What a Feeling (1979)
- Time Waits for No One (1989)
- The Voice (1993)
- Mavis Staples (1995)
- Spirituals & Gospel: Dedicated to Mahalia Jackson (with Lucky Peterson) (1996)
- Have a Little Faith (2004)
- We’ll Never Turn Back (2007)
- You Are Not Alone (2010)
- One True Vine (2013)
- Livin’ on a High Note (2016)
- If All I Was Was Black (2017)
- We Get By (2019)
Mavis Staples Songs
- Love And Trust