All this creativity was inspired by pain, struggle and bloodshed. The three Selma marches in 1965 aimed to draw attention to the struggle for black voting rights and proved to be a turning point in the struggle, as police turned tear gas, dogs and clubs on the unarmed protesters, walking arm and arm across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, with a ferocity that shook even the occupants of the White House.
Call to action
Pops Staples, patriarch of the acclaimed Chicago gospel group the Staple Singers, was touring when he saw media coverage of the event, and was horrified. He had become friends with King and he and his family had been appearing at rallies with him and on behalf of his civil-rights agenda. What he saw and experienced in the company of King politicized him. “If he can preach it, we can sing it,” he told the members of his group — daughters Mavis and Cleotha and son Pervis. After Selma, Pops wrote one of the signature songs of the movement, “Freedom Highway,” and debuted it only a few weeks later in a concert at the New Nazareth Church on Chicago’s South Side.
The concert was documented on album, also called “Freedom Highway,” originally issued on Epic Records in 1965. It had since gone out of print, but is finally being reissued in an expanded edition next month that secures its place as one of the great concert recordings ever — an historic merger of time and place, music and message, singers and community.
The newly mastered recording puts the listener in the front pew. After a stately version of “We Shall Overcome,” Pops Staples pauses to introduce his new song. “From that march, word was revealed and a song was composed,” he says, and his opening guitar riff sounds like a trumpet calling citizens to action. Mavis, Cleo and Pervis clap hands in intricate three-part polyrhythms atop Al Duncan’s drums and Phil Upchurch’s driving bass line, and then Mavis sings Pops’ lyrics with fierce determination.