In the 2015 documentary Mavis!, the then-75-year-old Mavis Staples reflected on the question she often gets about retirement. “I’ll stop singing when I have nothing left to say,” she said. “And we all know that ain’t never gonna happen!”

Now at 86, her prediction has remained true.

Staples has been an integral part of the American consciousness (and conscience) since she emerged in the late 1940s as the centerpiece of her family band, The Staple Singers. In the early days, the group traveled around the South, performing their gospel songs in churches and local venues. Those who had only heard their songs on records were shocked to discover the deep, powerful voice belonged to a young teenage girl, not an older man.

Sometime in the early 1960s, while on tour, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, the patriarch and leader of the group, took the family to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to hear Martin Luther King Jr. preach. After the service, Pops visited with Dr. King for an extended period of time to learn about his work.

“I like his message,” Pops told the family in the car afterward. “And if he can preach it, we can sing it.”

The group then began crafting what they called “freedom songs” to tell the story of the fight for civil rights in the South. These included tunes about the Little Rock Nine (“Why? (Am I Treated So Bad)”) and Emmett Till (“Freedom Highway”), among many others. Eventually, the Staple Singers were invited to sing their freedom songs to open events for MLK.

If the 1960s saw the message-music of the Staple Singers move from the church pews to the justice marches, the 1970s saw it reach the masses on the radio. Their 1972 anthem, “I’ll Take You There,” spent 15 weeks on the Billboard charts. It is still one of the best-selling gospel songs of all time and arguably the most widely recognized Staple Singers song.

The family continued to sing together until Pops’ death in 2000.

Throughout her long and storied solo career, Mavis Staples has continued to include at least a couple of Staple Singers freedom songs in her concerts. “Because I am a living witness,” she says, “I will keep singing them.”

The Devil’s Music

In a 2016 interview on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert asked Staples to describe the family’s transition from gospel to soul music. She told him that the Staple Singers never changed what they sang; they just added guitars and rhythm sections to the background.

“[People] began saying, ‘They’re singing the devil’s music,’” Staples told Colbert. “I did so many interviews where I had to let these people know that the devil ain’t got no music.”

This belief—that there is no distinction between sacred and secular music, that it all belongs to God—has animated Mavis Staples’ career from the beginning. It also carries over into conversations about musical genre. Although her songs have been labeled Gospel, R&B, and Soul, they find a home among disco and country music fans. The Staple Singers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, and Mavis Staples is a member of the Blues Hall of Fame.

Since the early 2010s, Staples has found a home in the world of Americana, which is less a genre than a musical community for artists without a home on commercial radio or with record companies. What began as a series of collaborations with Jeff Tweedy has blossomed into Mavis Staples becoming a matriarch in the community that includes artists such as Brandi Carlile, Allison Russell, Jason Isbell, and Rhiannon Giddens, to name just a few.

Sad and Beautiful World

In late 2025, “Mother Mavis,” as she is often referred to by her younger peers, released Sad and Beautiful World, her fourteenth solo album. The project consists mainly of Staples offering her interpretation of various cover songs written by roots-music luminaries such as Curtis Mayfield and Leonard Cohen, as well as young Americana songwriters.

True to the album’s title, the songs included on the project provide a balance of light and darkness, offering testimony to the evil and goodness in the world. Although the entire album is worth all the accolades it has received, the first three songs could be considered a twelve-minute musical dissertation on all Staples has seen and borne witness to over the course of her life.

The opening track, “Chicago,” is the closest listeners will get on the album to a classic Staple Singers anthem. First written and recorded in 2011 by Tom Waits, the horn-infused homage to the Windy City takes on greater urgency and deeper meaning of home and displacement in Staples’ hands.

Shortly after Pops Staples married Oceola, the family matriarch, they moved from their native Mississippi to Chicago to raise their family as part of the “Great Migration” documented in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns. Mavis still calls Chicago home. 

In the album’s most wistful and thoughtful song, Staples covers Kevin Morby’s 2016 “Beautiful Strangers” on the second track. The song pays reverence to the shared humanity of the unknown neighbors we pass on the street every day.

With allusions and references to numerous tragedies, such as the Pulse Nightclub shooting and the murder of Freddie Gray, “Beautiful Strangers” harkens back to the Staple Singers’ earlier collaborations with Bob Dylan in the Newport Folk Festival scene. (Dylan once proposed to Mavis, but was rejected.) 

“Sad and Beautiful World,” the title track from the album, shows the octogenarian’s ability to pass all the pain of the world through the grinder of her gravelly voice, hammering the tragedy out into thinner, more manageable portions:

Sometimes days speed so fast
Sometimes this one seems like the last
It’s a sad and beautiful world

In her youth, Mavis Staples threw her powerhouse vocals down from the heights, lifting the country out of the storms of injustice and pain. With Sad and Beautiful World, it feels more like Mother Mavis walking alongside us, holding us up and whispering, “It’s bad, but it’s gonna get better. Don’t forget, the devil ain’t got no music. So keep singing.”

Sad and Beautiful World was released on November 7, 2025, and is available on all major streaming platforms. More information on the remaining shows for the album’s tour can be found at MavisStaples.com.