Happy Birthday, Mavis

From a square in Amsterdam

I’m standing in the middle of Leiden Square in Amsterdam. The Netherlands just lost the Euro Cup semifinal to England. Two dudes are swatting at each other in a brawl that seems unrelated to the match. And a teenage girl is barfing from a bench in the corner, her friend holding her hair back. I’ve eaten my weight in pommes frites.

Waxahatchee is in Europe!

At BBC London, photo by Katie

We flew to Amsterdam on a KLM plane. I love those planes for two reasons. The lesser reason is that KLM has one of the best logos of all time. Those four dots of a crown, all thick lines, robin’s egg blue. It’s like Aaron Draplin traveled in time to 1961, infiltrated the mind of German graphic designer Henri Kay Henrion, and won the Dutch contract. (Or maybe, likelier, Henrion’s influence rippled all the way to Aaron’s bold lines over the years.)

The bigger reason is that when I was a kid, my dad would bring model planes home from airport gift shops around the world. After any tour abroad he’d pull little plane boxes from his suitcase and give them to Sammy and me. I loved every one of them, but KLM’s the most because even a child can tell that crown logo is fire.

More important than Royal Dutch Airlines:

It’s Mavis Staples’ birthday! Wish Mavis a Happy Birthday! Put on some Staple Singers!

I watched Mavis!, Jessica Edwards’ 2015 documentary, for the first time a few months ago.

Of course only Mavis can be the judge of how they told her story (so far). But to me, Jessica and company told it well with a big, light heart.

The film had me thinking about my family’s relationship with Mavis. In these fifteen years (!) of knowing each other, I’ve loved Mavis for who she is, for how she lights up every room, and of course for her music. I’ve recognized how lucky we are to spend time with someone who’s contributed so much to the world. But all of those feelings are about Mavis in terms of who she is to everybody. I hadn’t stopped in a while to think about what we mean to each other.

Seeing my dad and me in the doc put it into third personal perspective, allowed me to see us as a part of her life and her a part of ours to an extent that would raise internal anti-conceit alarm bells if it cropped up in everyday thought.

It’s a wonder that my dad and Mavis ever ended up close enough to interpret songs that her family sang when she was young (but never recorded), and to write new songs with and for her that relate to the messages they always delivered. (Little birdies at Anti Records played a big part in the getting-together.)

And it’s a wonder to me that Mavis has let my dad bring me into two of her records and Pops’s Don’t Lose This. That she let it become a family affair, like hers was, when I was so young and she had nothing more than my dad’s support and a few demos to judge from. I can trace so many of the musical relationships in my life to her choice.

I remember watching Mavis sing, at a festival in 2019, “When I say my life matters / You can say yours does too / But I bet you never have to remind anyone / To look at it from your point of view,” to cheers of recognition. My dad and I looked at each other in the crowd and cried from witnessing strangers react to the Staple Singers’ cardinal truths living on in a new song, one he’d written.

Credit: Taylor Hill/Getty Images

Sometimes people look to a legend like Mavis, who witnessed the ground floor of historic movements and who’s escaped every musical shoebox anyone has ever put her in, and wonder how to understand her. Ordinary or supernatural? Master of her own life or subject of record label powers? Black or Mavis?

It’s a weird thing some of us do with people of her stature: try to shrink them down to a concept we can hold in our mind, to contain someone who is a spiritual giant in one or a few words as if we’re overwhelmed by their uncontainableness. In reality, no one is so definable. The answer to any of those questions may be all that, and more.

If I have to understand Mavis in a fragment, I think the best one may be “a person who loves to sing.” Gospel or rock, soul or roots, she’s always “just” singing. It’s always the same thing, whether it uses words about a promised land, about segregation, or about getting together with someone cute. Or no words at all.

I often think about Pops’s famous rebuttal to members of the church who accused the Staples of turning their backs on God. “The devil ain’t got no music. All music is God’s music.” So, the singing contains it all. Mavis proves it every day.

Anywho. Happy Birthday, Grandma. I love you. To me, you are everything music can and should be. Ecstatic, low, and truthful.