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The first time I read that name, Mavis Staples, was a century ago, in an article about Bob Dylan's "flames": it seems Bob asked her to marry him and she gave him the classic brush-off. Some decades later, I read an interview where she joked about that story, saying she refused the proposal because she would have knocked that little Bob out in less than 30 seconds, and back then, she couldn't possibly marry him.
I didn't fall in love with her just because I had been in love with her since the first time I saw her.
The first time I saw that face was a little less than a century ago, Dylan was still involved, albeit indirectly, he was around while she was with the family and those from the Band, shooting a scene from the film "The Last Waltz" and singing a song called "The Weight".
In one fell swoop, I fell in love with the Band, the Staple Singers, and indeed with Mavis.
Mavis recounted that the first song she learned from her father Pops was "Will The Circle Be Unbroken," the circle is and will always be unbroken and if it breaks, someone must close it and make it unbroken again.
Here, this "Carry Me Home" is more than an album; it's a circle being closed by Mavis and Levon Helm on the notes of "The Weight," and it couldn't be otherwise: it's a beautiful album, for anyone with a minimal sensitivity to grasp its beauty; even more for those who have been in love with the Band, the Staple Singers, and Mavis Staples and everything that surrounds them for time immemorial.
It's the Band of "Rock Of Ages" that memorized Allen Toussaint's arrangements, it's the Staple Singers of home at Stax, it's a century of blues, jazz, gospel, soul, and rhythm'n'blues revisited with extraordinary intensity and vigor by a large gathering led by two indomitable old folks, at the time, 71-year-old Levon and 72-year-old Mavis; today, Mavis is nearing 86 and still occasionally stirs emotion, whereas Levon died a few months after these recordings, made public on the decennial occasion.
One of the most pleasant memories of those days, when I happened to fall in love with the Band or the Staple Singers, is that buying an album was often an act of blind faith, and after 40 years, I am firmly convinced that even the feeling of disappointment I experienced at times for a wrong purchase was "beautiful"; what remains today are a few, sparse albums I insist on buying as an act of pure and blind faith.
"Carry Me Home" was one of these, even before the Band of "Rock Of Ages," the Staple Singers settled at Stax, blah blah blah.
Starting from Curtis Mayfield's "This Is My Country" and up to Dylan (always him involved) with "You Got To Serve Somebody," through the good old times with Pops of "Move Along Train" and "This May Be The Last Time" and the Levon Helm Band of "When I Go Away," the pre-war blues "Trouble In Mind" and "You Got To Move" adorned with a shiny rhythm'n'blues form, a "Farther Along" supported only by Mavis's spine-chilling voice and the joyful gospel of "Hand Writing On the Wall" so contagious it rivals that of James Brown that floods brother Jake and Elwood with light, everything inside this album speaks of souls who suffer and rejoice and hearts that beat strong and fast and then reconcile.
In the end, a choral "The Weight" and the only thing to do is to stand and applaud, even if almost 15 years have passed since that moment.
Extraordinary album, if you have no idea what I've written about give it a listen and you will fall in love.
All the others already are.
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