IT’S MORNING AS we drive through Bronzeville, passing soul food restaurants, 19th century mansions, humble brick buildings, Baptist churches and a contemporary arts district. This neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side nurtured many American music icons during the Great Migration of 1916–1970: early jazz pioneers King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, electric blues innovators Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, gospel trailblazers Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, and the forerunner of soul, Sam Cooke. Gospel music as an industry was born here when Black congregations took over the churches after the White flight. The new ministers, middle-class and educated, seeking to assimilate with White society, wanted nothing to do with blues. When Dorsey and Jackson became national superstars by embracing their blues roots, the community’s church doors reluctantly opened a crack toward secular music influences.
It was in this tension-filled intersection of blues and gospel that, in the 1940s, Roebuck “Pops” Staples gathered his children Cleotha, Pervis, Yvonne and Mavis in the living room of their Bronzeville home to teach them spirituals from his childhood in the Mississippi Delta. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” was the first. With a pawnshop acoustic guitar, he assigned each voice to a harmony, creating a blend that sounded like no other vocal group. Later, he would accompany himself and his family group on an electric guitar plugged into a DeArmond tremolo unit, creating a signature tone that has influenced generations of guitarists.
“To me, that tremolo, vibrato and deep, rich reverb, paired with his guitar of choice, provided a direct line to the heavens,” says Ben Harper, who worked with Mavis Staples as a producer and songwriter on her 2019 album, . Harper grew up hearing the Staple Singers’ albums as a child in his family-run music store, The Folk Music Center, in Claremont, California. “I hear a great deal of Pops in the overarching sonic landscape of what has become
