Gospel group, basking in resurgence, releases first new music in nearly 50 years

BOSTON (AP):

She made a single gospel soul record in the 1970s with her brothers, when they were all teenagers. Then Annie Brown Caldwell moved on with her life. Decades later, she was running a clothing store in a tiny Mississippi town and singing on weekends with her husband and children when she got a call from a label founded by David Byrne. They wanted to add a single from her first band, the Staples Jr. Singers, to a compilation record.

That 2019 call led to more — the Luaka Bop label reissued the band’s 1975 record When Do We Get Paid, drawing rave reviews in 2022 for its raw sound and mix of blues, funk and soul. And soon the Brown siblings, now in their 60s, found themselves on a course that would make any rising pop star jealous.

In the past four years, they flew for the first time, toured Europe four times and played hipster clubs like Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right. And, finally last year, they saw a performance by Mavis Staples, whose group The Staple Singers inspired their own early sound with genre-busting, socially conscious Stax Records hits. Also a band of siblings, they had covered several of their songs.

“It’s been a dream come true,” said Brown Caldwell, who was 11 when she and R. C. and Edward, who were 12 and 13, co-founded The Staples Jr Singers in 1967. They started playing in the church where their mother was a preacher and father a deacon, and toured by van around the south.

And, last Friday, the Browns released Searching, their first batch of new songs in nearly 50 years, and gearing up for a tour in July to the Roskilde festival in Denmark, as well as the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Germany.

“It’s a blessing,” Brown Caldwell said. “It feels good. We are getting older and it seems the Lord just now is blessing our youth like it’s brand new again.”

Their resurgence began with a record collector who stumbled on their first single in a Midwest thrift store and bought it for $1.

Greg Belson was intrigued that the band’s name was so similar to The Staple Singers. He put We Got a Race to Run on a portable turntable he often brings with him, and was struck by their sound.

Yale Evelev, the president of Luaka Bop, heard Belson’s radio show and pulled from his collection for a compilation of 1970s gospel soul song. He wanted to include the Staples Jr Singers single, but first he had to find the band. He figured out that Annie Brown was now Annie Caldwell, and called all seven listed in Mississippi. He reached Brown Caldwell on the last call.

She agreed to put the single out but her brothers were initially resistant. They worked it out, and agreed to perform four shows in New York in 2022.

Evelev heard some songs that weren’t on their 1975 record and asked if they had any unreleased music. It turned out they recorded about a dozen songs in Muscle Shoals in the 1980s.

Evelev brought in Ahmed Gallab, who performs as the artiste Sinkane, as a producer, and he recorded them over two nights in a Mississippi church. Gallab then went to Nashville to mix it and do some overdubs, aiming to have the songs “ring as true as possible” to when he first heard them play.

The band members — now four generations of the Brown family — shrug off their newfound celebrity. On the latest record, R. C. plays guitar and the two other siblings sing. Edward’s son sings backing vocals, R. C’s son plays bass and R. C’s grandson plays drums.

They still live in Aberdeen where they grew up and all three insist their mission remains the same, to spread the word of God and inspire listeners to follow his path.