When 71-year-old gospel legend Mavis Staples hits the stage Friday at Lollapalooza, she won't worry about how she'll be received by the indie-rock fans in Chicago's Grant Park.
Not only does she have the Lord and six decades of testifying and protesting in her righteous repertoire, this time she has Jeff Tweedy.
The Wilco frontman and fellow Chicagoan produced her new album, You Are Not Alone, and though he probably won't join her onstage (she's playing the Wilco-curated Solid Sound festival Aug. 14 in North Adams, Mass., where a pairing is more likely), Staples will perform two songs Tweedy wrote for her.
"Our music goes everywhere, and youngsters just like it," she says during a promo stop for the album, out Sept. 14. "I live in Chicago, so I know what (Lollapalooza) is like. But I got to figure out, what should I wear?"
Staples laughs in that husky, impossibly low voice that first turned heads in 1950 when she was the 12-year-old lead vocalist for the Staple Singers, led by her late father, Roebuck "Pops" Staples. Throughout a career that would make them a leading civil-rights voice in the '60s and land them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, Pops regularly reminded Mavis and siblings: " 'You're singing God's music. You be sincere. What comes from the heart reaches the heart,' " she says. "So whatever audience it is, that's my trump card. I think it's going to be a barrel of fun."
Staples says she has been thoroughly enjoying the Tweedy association since he met her backstage in 2008 at a club date in Chicago, where she was recording a live album. According to Staples, Tweedy (who was unavailable for comment) was a fan and collector of the Staple Singers music and enjoyed her 2007 Ry Cooder-produced solo album, We'll Never Turn Back, which revisited civil-rights anthems. Tweedy wanted to try his luck with a still-magnetic voice that had once made Bob Dylan love-struck, inspired Martin Luther King Jr., been produced by Prince, been featured in duets with Ray Charles and George Jones, and been sampled by Ice Cube and Ludacris.
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SOURCE: USA Today - Jerry Shriver
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