Staples Performs With Amazing Grace in Irvine

Mavis Staples singing the gospel catalog of her mentor Mahalia Jackson may be as artful and expressive as music gets, and something unquestionably worthy of gracing concert halls typically attuned to classical music.

Such austere settings aren’t exactly worthy of the music, however, robbing it of the essential immediacy that springs from the unfettered interaction between performer and audience in church.

That this writer could even come up with a sentence as stiff as the previous one while attending Staples’ show at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Friday should suggest that something wasn’t connecting there.

Through the first several songs Staples and her keyboard accompanist Tony Dyson seemed as splendid, and distant, as the Milky Way. So why then were tears welling in these eyes, and I dare say in several others, six songs into the concert as the 59-year-old contralto sang Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Precious Lord Take My Hand”?

Perhaps it is because Staples’ miraculous, hall-filling voice eventually finds a way to connect in any context, be it a ‘60s freedom rally, a ‘90s funk session with the former Prince, or performing before a respectful but apparently embalmed audience.

Perhaps it is because the song, as Staples noted, was Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite song, the one gospel queen Jackson sang at his funeral, and perhaps because Staples’ voice imbued its simple lyrics with all the struggle, pain, perseverance and faith that forms our nation’s racial history in this century.

Even as a teenager with the Staple Singers in the 1950s, Staples had a world-wise and deeply emotive voice, and time has only enriched those qualities. Backed by Dyson at the Hammond B-3 organ--producing sounds that weren’t so much notes as rolling peals of thunder--Staples grabbed hold of “Precious Lord Take My Hand” and by the time she was done had wrung every drop of feeling from it, earning a standing ovation from the no-longer-so-staid audience.

From that point through the second half of her show, Staples in effect brought the church into the theater. For Staples, the concert’s program is the completion of a circle that began when she was a toddler enraptured with her dad’s 78-rpm records of Jackson. While still a child, she began singing with the Staple Singers, and by age 11 she was sharing stages with Jackson, whom she idolized. (“She was my Spice Girl” was how Staples put it Friday.)

In the 1960s the group stepped beyond traditional gospel music to become active in the civil rights movement, and in the early ‘70s forayed into secular music with such Stax Records hits as “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There.”

The group, led by the now 89-year-old Pops Staples, has continued to move freely between sacred and secular music (even assaying the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” in 1985). In 1989 Mavis hooked up with the Artist Formerly Known as Prince for the first of two solo albums, featuring some of Mr. Formerly’s best songs and production work of the last decade.

In 1996, Staples teamed with blues organist Lucky Peterson to record “Spirituals and Gospel,” returning to the Jackson songs that had first inspired her. Most of her 14-song set Friday was from that album, with longtime Staples keyboardist Dyson more than making up for Peterson’s absence.

Among the standouts were a funky reading of “Wade in the Water,” the moody, minor-key “Troubles of the World” (a Jackson standard not on the “Spirituals and Gospel” disc) and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” given a New Orleans funeral treatment, in which Staples paced the first verse like a slow, weary procession and then kicked the remainder of the song into a celebratory gear.

Even the over-performed and usually overwrought “Amazing Grace” sounded fresh coming from Staples. Other gospel stars and pop divas may be capable of grand vocal swoops, but Staples’ contralto sometimes swoops so low it drags gravel with it, and the intent of her vocal lines seems similarly down to earth, always ringing emotionally true rather than being mere vocal affectations.