11/07/2026
Bob Dylan asked Pops Staples for permission to marry his daughter Mavis in the dining hall at the Newport Folk Festival in August of 1963. Mavis was 24 and thought she was too young to be married, so she turned him down. She would say later he was the great love she lost.
Fifty-three years later Dylan invited her on tour, and when they embraced backstage, he told her, if you had married me you'd see me every day.
It was a Sunday morning in Montgomery, Alabama, sometime in the early sixties. Pops Staples had heard Dr. Martin Luther King preach on the radio and told his daughters at the hotel that morning that he wanted to go see the man in person.
They all piled into the car and drove over to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
They were ushered in and seated. Someone let King know the Staples were in the audience.
From the pulpit at eleven o'clock, King acknowledged them. "We're glad to have Pops Staples here this morning and his daughters."
Mavis was in her early twenties, sitting in the pew.
When the service was over, King stood at the door shaking hands as the worshippers filed out. Pops stopped to talk with him for a while.
They got back to the hotel. Pops called his daughters into his room.
"Listen y'all," he said, "I like this man's message. If he can preach it, we can sing it."
Mavis had been singing publicly since 1948, when she was eight years old.
Pops had been in a gospel quartet in Chicago that kept skipping rehearsal. One Sunday afternoon he got tired of waiting on them and sat his four children in a semicircle on the living-room floor of the apartment and taught them a song called "If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again."
An aunt overheard them and invited them to sing at her church the next Sunday. The offering that morning was seven dollars, and by the end of the service there were invitations from other churches.
That was the beginning of the Staple Singers.
Pops played guitar. Cleotha sang high, Pervis and Yvonne filled in, and Mavis, the youngest, the skinny knock-kneed girl with the grown woman's voice, sang bass.
By fifteen she was singing lead on the family's records. Chicago deejays would put "Uncloudy Day" on the radio and announce this is little fifteen-year-old Mavis Staples, and listeners called in convinced the voice belonged to a grown man or a big lady.
At live shows people would place bets against her when it came time for her part. One man was mad enough after losing to tell her, little girl, I bet on my paycheck.
Pops told him he shouldn't bet.
When Mavis graduated from Parker High School in 1957, Pops took the group on the road. Before they went south, he sat his daughters down.
"Now, y'all," he said, "everybody don't like you. You're gonna see signs on the water fountains and on doors."
They sang everywhere anyway.
That is the family that ended up at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church that Sunday in the early sixties.
They wrote "Freedom Highway" for the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. Pops wrote it while the marchers were still walking.
On the first attempt, they had been stopped at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and turned back.
On the third attempt, on Sunday, March 21, 1965, about 3,200 people set out from Selma. They walked twelve miles a day and slept in fields.
By the time they came into Montgomery four days later, they were 25,000 strong.
Two weeks after the march, they went back to their home parish, New Nazareth Church on the South Side of Chicago, and recorded "Freedom Highway" live with the congregation clapping along.
King loved a song of theirs called "Why (Am I Treated So Bad)." Before rallies he would ask Pops the same question every time.
You gonna play my song tonight?
The Staple Singers became his opening act. They sang the room ready.
April 4, 1968. The Staples were in Nashville, walking out of a hotel room to head to a show, when the news came that Dr. King had been killed in Memphis.
Pops tried to hold his crying children together.
"We couldn't talk to each other for the longest time about it," Mavis said later, "without crying."
The movement had lost its center. The family kept going.
August 20, 1972. Al Bell of Stax Records had rented the entire Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for a benefit concert on the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots.
Tickets were a dollar apiece. A hundred and twelve thousand Black people bought them.
They called it Wattstax. Isaac Hayes closed the night in his gold chain vest and shades.
Earlier in the afternoon, Jesse Jackson led the whole coliseum in reciting "I Am Somebody."
The Staple Singers went out and sang "Respect Yourself." A reviewer said Mavis's voice made the coliseum feel like a Baptist revival.
"I'll Take You There" hit number one on the pop charts that same year.
"Let's Do It Again" hit number one three years later.
She had turned Bob Dylan down a decade before that.
They had met at a New York gospel concert in September of 1962.
In August of 1963, at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan and the Staples were both on the bill. Somewhere in the dining hall, Dylan told Pops he wanted to marry his daughter.
Mavis was twenty-four. She thought she was too young to be married.
She would say later, more than once, that he was the great love she lost.
Their friendship never stopped.
In 2016 Dylan called and asked her to open for him on a summer tour. When they finally embraced backstage for the first time in decades, he told her, well, if you had married me you'd see me every day.
She said, oh my God, don't do me like that.
In March 1999 the Staple Singers walked out at the Waldorf Astoria for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Pops stood there with all four of his children beside him.
He was gone by the end of the following year.
Died in his sleep on December 19, 2000.
Mavis was sixty-one. She said it was the hardest thing that ever happened to her.
She and Pops had been singing together for more than fifty years, and she could not stand on a stage without his guitar behind her.
She stopped performing for a while. Yvonne is the one who pulled her back.
Before he went, Pops had given her one piece of advice about her voice, and she has been trying to obey it every night since.
Mavis, he told her, you don't need no gimmicks.
Sing from your heart. What comes from the heart reaches the heart.
Cleotha, the oldest, the one with the smooth high alto that had shaped the group's whole sound, was already forgetting things by then. Alzheimer's disease.
She had been the one who took care of the younger children when they were small, and now her sisters took care of her.
Cleotha died at her home on Chicago's South Side on February 21, 2013.
She was seventy-eight.
Yvonne went next. She had been the middle sister, the businesswoman who ran the group's road life, and she was gone at home in Chicago on April 10, 2018, at eighty.
Pervis was last. The only brother, the one who had left the group for the Army and come back, died at his home in Dolton, Illinois, on May 6, 2021, at eighty-five.
Mavis stood beside his casket in a room full of mourners still wearing masks from the pandemic. When somebody put on "I'll Take You There," the service became a homegoing.
She was eighty-one that day.
There was still work waiting for her at home in Chicago.
There was more of it, in fact, than there had been in a long time. She had won her first competitive Grammy at seventy-one for an album called "You Are Not Alone," produced by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco.
President Obama gave her the Kennedy Center Honor in December 2016.
The Blues Hall of Fame took her in as a solo artist in 2017.
Hozier put her voice on a song of his called "Nina Cried Power" the year after that. He became a friend and started calling her Mama Mavis.
For her eightieth birthday in May 2019, she went back to the Apollo Theater in Harlem and did a concert. She had first walked out on that stage in 1956, at sixteen, with Pops and Cleotha and Pervis and Yvonne behind her.
Sixty-three years later, none of them were behind her.
She filled the room.
She released "Sad and Beautiful World" in November 2025, with Buddy Guy and Derek Trucks on the record and Bonnie Raitt singing on it. Hozier wrote her a song for it called "Human Mind."
That album won her two more Grammys at eighty-six.
Four weeks before her birthday this year, she was on stage two nights in a row at the Ordway Music Hall in St. Paul.
She has said the same thing in so many rooms that the people who love her know it by heart.
She said it in Roanoke in 2018. She said it in Carmel in 2015.
She said it in Austin in 2014, when President Obama sat in the front row of the LBJ civil rights summit and she opened it for him.
"I was there, and I'm still here. I'm a living witness."
She turned 87 on July 10.
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