New Haven Independent

It took two summers and three tries to get Mavis Staples headlining an Arts & Ideas Festival concert on the Green. Mother Nature kept getting in the way.

When Staples finally made it onstage under still uncertain skies Sunday night, it was a triumph. A triumph of song, of course. And a triumph of perseverance.

(Click the play arrow on the video for highlights.)

Her Arts & Ideas Festival concert was originally supposed to take place on the Green last June. A torrential downpour scrapped that plan.

Arts & Ideas had to cancel her rescheduled engagement this Saturday night. Same reason. Rain.

This year festival organizers made sure to schedule a rain date, for Sunday. And they scheduled an alternative indoor venue, at Woolsey Hall, in case they were unlucky enough to encounter yet another storm on the rain date as well.

It looked like the festival crowd would have to squeeze into Woolsey after all: Sunday was another overcast day, with intermittent rain. Gray clouds threatened as the 8 p.m. starting time approached.

But the rains held back.

Mavis Staples was another story.

At 69 years old, Staples showed she could still belt out gospel and R&B classics that her family group, the Staple Singers, made famous in the 1960s and ’70s, including crossover hits like “I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself.” Both numbers were familiar crowd-pleasers Sunday night. So was The Band’s “The Weight,” which the Staple Singers memorably collaborated on in the film The Last Waltz. Time and again Sunday night she reached into a repository some place deep in her soul to summon shouts of rightous declaration.

Perseverance was the text as well as the context of the evening. Mavis Staples took the audience back through her five decade-long career, from the family’s beginnings as a gospel-circuit group, through its alliance with Martin Luther King, Jr. and its ride along the Freedom Trail of the Civil Rights Movement, then the heights of the pop charts and collaborations with top musicians.

In Staples’ telling, it was all about setting a goal and never looking back. She recalled joining arms at a Jim Crow restaurant and refusing to leave. “Keep your eyes on the prize,” she sang. “Hold on.”

As dusk turned to dark, a gentle breeze swept through the Green. The glow of stage lights succeeded the last beams of daylight. A steady, popping bass kept Staples’ set driving forward, punctuated by sometimes fluid, sometimes swamp-hypnotic electric guitar leads (part Steve Cropper, part John Fogerty). The music told another tale of perseverance: how, at the crossroads of the sacred and the profane, popular American music from blues to R&B to rock, like movements for social justice, has never lost their gospel roots.

Sunday night, the Green was the church. Mavis Staples was the preacher. And that band of angels never sounded so good.