When Staples finished high school, in 1957, Pops quit his job and declared it possible for the Staple Singers to focus completely on their music. Staples resisted, telling him that she wanted to study to be a nurse. “He said, ‘Mavis, baby, don’t you know you’re already a nurse?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Don’t you know that when you be singing, and those people come around crying and want to touch your hand, you’re making them feel better?’ ” Staples was not the rebellious sort. The Staples were now a full-time concern. “Uncloudy Day,” which the group had recorded with Vee-Jay Records the previous year, was getting a lot of radio play; they were performing before bigger audiences, on longer, multistate tours. (The Staples later expanded into gospel-inflected soul and pop, on Riverside, Epic, Stax, and other labels.) They even made guest appearances on network television.
Pops did not think of his family, at first, as a political enterprise, but he’d been listening intently to Dr. King’s sermons on the radio, and, while the Staple Singers were in Montgomery, Alabama, they went one Sunday to a service at Dr. King’s church on Dexter Avenue. In a meeting afterward, King made it plain to Pops that the Staple Singers had a role to play in the movement. Enslaved people sang “Steal Away” on the plantations and abolitionists sang “John Brown’s Body” during the Civil War, King once reminded a reporter. “For the same reasons the slaves sang, Negroes today sing freedom songs, for we, too, are in bondage.” That was the case he made to Pops.
The family went back to their hotel, and Pops called his children to his room. “I like this man’s message,” he said. “And I think that if he can preach it, we can sing it.” In the early nineteen-sixties, the Staple Singers started releasing “message songs”: “I’ve Been Scorned,” “Freedom Highway,” “Long Walk to D.C.,” “Respect Yourself,” “When Will We Be Paid?,” and Dr. King’s favorite, “Why? (Am I Treated So Bad).” Although they maintained their restrained sound, their lyrics grew more insistently political: “The whole wide world is wonderin’ what’s wrong with the United States,” they sang in “Freedom Highway.” Those songs became as important to the movement as Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” or the Impressions’ “Keep on Pushing.” This was a commitment that Mavis Staples would go on upholding. She admires the current crop of rappers whose music is saturated with both politics and gospel influence—Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar among them—and doesn’t want to sing only the songs of the civil-rights era. Disgusted by the election of Donald Trump and the bigotry it enabled, she teamed up with her friend Jeff Tweedy on an album of assertively political new material, “If All I Was Was Black.”