PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — One day after releasing her latest album, the luminous gospel-soul singer Mavis Staples came to Portsmouth to kick off a dozen or so tour dates.
“We opened this joint,” she noted from the stage — in the fall of 2021, she was one of the first artists to play Jimmy’s Jazz & Blues Club.
On Saturday, she and her five-piece band treated the classy joint to a classy 70-minute set of songs by her family band, the Staple Singers, and from her own solo career. At 86, Staples has become a godmother of sorts to younger generations of indie artists. Her new album, “Sad And Beautiful World,” includes songs written by Kevin Morby, Gillian Welch, and Frank Ocean.
“I am the last, daddy, last of us,” she sang midway through the set on the somber new song “Human Mind.” That one was co-written for Staples by Hozier and Allison Russell. Roebuck “Pops” Staples, her father, led the family band for most of the latter half of the 20th century. He died in 2000, at the age of 85. The last of Mavis’s siblings, brother Pervis, died in 2021.
Saturday’s show featured a stripped-down trio led by guitarist Rick Holmstrom, who has played with Mavis Staples for nearly 20 years. Two women singers rounded out the lineup.
Wringing maximum effect out of a sparse setup – a Telecaster and a Vox amp – Holmstrom has mastered Pops Staples’s distinctively slinky, endlessly rhythmic style of playing. Some of the most impressive moments of the evening came when the band slowed to a crawl and muted themselves while the matriarch testified.
“Too many people telling too many lies,” Staples sang to open the show, on the Staple Singers’s 1974 song “City In The Sky.” Wearing a gauzy knee-length wrap and a pair of sneakers, Staples eased into the performance.
By the third song, the jump-bluesy Bible thumper “Handwriting on the Wall,” they’d found their footing.
“Drop that seatbelt and shake your tailfeather,” Staples said between songs, imploring the audience to get up and dance.
On a cover of Tom Waits’s “Chicago,” Holmstrom dug deep for some real gutbucket blues. In Staples’s hands, that song became a testament to the Great Migration: Pops Staples moved in the 1930s from his native Mississippi to Chicago, where Mavis was born and still lives.
She introduced “Why? (Am I Treated So Bad)” as “Dr. King’s favorite song.” (During the Civil Rights Movement, the Staple Singers often warmed up crowds at Martin Luther King Jr.’s speaking appearances.) That song featured a spoken interlude during which Staples told a story about her grandmother’s constant moaning – while she was cooking, or quilting, or gardening.
Finally, she recalled, she got up enough nerve to ask her elder why she was always moaning.
“When you moan,” her grandmother replied, “the devil don’t know what you’re talking about.”
A fist bump with Holmstrom led into the next number, one of the Staples’s great “message” songs, “Freedom Highway,” written in 1965: “The whole world is wondering / What’s wrong with the United States?”
Staples coaxed every ounce of inspiration out of that song. “I won’t turn around,” she growled, prolonging the finish. “Got too much more work to do. It ain’t over yet. I won’t go back!”
That energy launched the show to another level, from the Staples’s biggest pop hit, “Respect Yourself,” to the sing-along “Heavy Makes You Happy (Sha-Na-Boom Boom).”
The band ended on “Everybody Needs Love,” the closing song from the new album. Written by the late Muscle Shoals session guitarist Eddie Hinton, it’s the kind of mid-tempo anthem that sounds instantly familiar the first time you hear it.
It was the simplest kind of message song.
MAVIS STAPLES
At Jimmy’s Jazz & Blues Club, Portsmouth, N.H., Saturday
James Sullivan can be reached at [email protected].
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