An Exclusive Double Bill: MAVIS STAPLES AND THE BLIND BOYS OF ALABAMA
WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED
Friday, 2/8/08, 8 pm
Page Auditorium
$42 • $34 • $25 • $5*
Mavis Staples sang with her siblings and her father, Pops in the legendary Staple Singers, “God’s Greatest Hitmakers”—a group that provided the soundtrack to the civil rights movement and straddled the fine line between sacred and secular soul. During her solo career, Staples has hit every crucial location in soul music, from Memphis and Muscle Shoals to Prince’s Paisley Park Studios. Throughout that essential work, Staples rings with her distinctive gospel-soul colorings, her always-recognizable voice charting the uncanny relationship belief bears to seduction.
Since their founding at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind in 1939,
The Blind Boys of Alabama have been at the top of the gospel game, sharing
the throne as the genre’s unrivaled kings with the Dixie Hummingbirds. Says the Blind Boys’ 76 year-old lead, Clarence
Fountain: “When we hit the road in 1944, I told the Lord, we
made a deal, I told Him if He’d make us successful, I’d stay
on the battlefield and I wouldn’t change our message.” He hasn’t,
and at last count, the messengers have won 5 Grammies and continue to record
roof-raising classics of the gospel tradition.
“Mavis Staples is the epitome of soul.”
—Prince
"When The Blind Boys of Alabama open their mouths to sing, what comes out is older than salvation, older than redemption. It is the sound of oppression and struggle. It is the sound of revelation and liberation. It is a sound as old as time. The Blind Boys of Alabama are the pyramids of gospel music; the birthplace of sacred soul."
—Ben Harper
Mavis Staples on the web:
Mavis Staples videos:
"Eyes on the Prize"- second video
The Blind Boys on the web:
www.blindboys.com
www.myspace.com/blindboysofalabama
This presentation of Mavis Staples & the Blind Boys of Alabama is funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts:
For the past 25 years the NEA has honored master artists and tradition bearers with NEA National Heritage Fellowships, the federal government’s highest form of recognition of folk and traditional artists. This program is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts presented with support from the Darden Restaurants Foundation and the Darden family of restaurants including Red Lobster and Olive Garden.
On line at www.nea.gov/honors/heritage