Yvonne Staples, key voice for the Staple Singers, dies at 80

Yvonne Staples, who died Tuesday at 80, was the reluctant singer in the Staple Singers. She preferred to play a background role and sang only when called upon by her father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples.

But she was a key voice both on and off the stage during the Staples’ most commercially successful era — including hits such as “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself” — and played a crucial role in the late-blooming solo career of her younger sister, Mavis Staples. She proved to be a rock in her family’s time of greatest need.

Yvonne Staples died at her apartment in Chicago’s South Shore community in the care of her surviving siblings, Mavis and Pervis Staples. She was diagnosed with cancer a couple of weeks ago.

Yvonne Staples was born in 1937, the third of five children of Pops Staples and his wife, Osceola,who hade moved to the South Side of Chicago from a sharecropper’s farm in Mississippi. Pops Staples learned to play guitar while studying blues pioneer Charley Patton and sang in gospel quartets. He melded the styles when he taught his children — Pervis, Cleotha, Yvonne and Mavis — how to sing gospel harmonies in the family’s living room. (A fifth child, Cynthia, was born later and did not become part of the group.)

They became proficient enough to start singing in churches throughout Chicago and the Midwest, and had their first national hit in 1957 with “Uncloudy Day.” At the time, Yvonne was not performing with the group, preferring to play a background role. “At an early age, Yvonne was taking care of business and subtly running things,” Pops Staples once said.

But as her siblings took sabbaticals from the group in the ’60s — Pervis to serve in the U.S. Army, Cleotha to get married — Yvonne stepped up each time and melded her voice with the group, drawing on her childhood singing lessons with her father. The group was a hit on the gospel circuit, but numerous record labels could not cross the group over to the pop charts and emulate the success of the family’s childhood friends, including Sam Cooke, Lou Rawls and Aretha Franklin.

Yvonne Staples rejoined the group in the late ’60s, just as it was trying to forge a commercial breakthrough with Stax Records in Memphis, Tenn. Yvonne had other interests besides singing — she worked as a secretary and volunteered at a hospital for the mentally ill — but it was a make-or-break moment in the group’s career, and Pops Staples called upon her one more time after Pervis Staples left to pursue a career as a music industry executive and nightclub owner.

“Pressure? I didn’t feel any pressure,” Yvonne said in an interview a few years ago. “When Daddy asked us to do something, we did it. No questions asked.”

She harmonized expertly with her sisters and they enjoyed a strong run of hits, usually in tandem with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section in Alabama. She and her family became key voices in the ’60s civil rights movement, often at the right hand of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and then forged a series of message songs in the ’70s that helped shape a new African American consciousness.

After Pops Staples died in 2000, the group dissolved, and Mavis Staples — the group’s lead vocalist — went into a deep funk. She felt lost without her father’s guidance and stopped performing. Yvonne Staples, not known for mincing words, let her sister know exactly how she felt.

“Yvonne got me,” Mavis Staples later said. “Yvonne said, ‘Mavis, your daddy would want you to keep singing. You’ve got to get up. You’re daddy’s legacy’ .… And that’s when she started with the other words: ‘Damn it, Mavis,’ and worse. It woke me up.”

Yvonne knew her sister needed support, and she soon started joining Mavis Staples onstage as a backing singer and de facto band leader. If band members missed a note or were off-key, they usually heard from Yvonne Staples.

Beyond that, Yvonne Staples helped set the tone for what became a series of successful solo records by her younger sister. In many ways, the sparse instrumentation and backing harmonies in Mavis Staples’ recordings and concerts the last decade echoed the arrangements that she had known from an early age with the Staple Singers.

Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.

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