Muscle Shoals-I'll Take You There

The Staple Singers: I’ll Take You There
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I’m a little surprised that I’ve never devoted a post to the great Mavis Staples—although she is mentioned at length in the In Memoriam piece that I wrote in January 2019 honoring her sister Yvonne. I’ve seen Mavis perform a few times, and every time she simply blew me away. She’s in her 80’s, has recorded amazing music her whole life—including a bunch of great albums over the past few years, and as I write this, is on tour, with dates scheduled in North America and Europe through next summer. If you get a chance to see her, do it, because sadly, she isn’t going to be around forever. And go see Mavis!, the movie from 2015 about her life, which is streamable. And while you are at it, make sure you see Summer of Soul, in which the young Mavis duets with her idol Mahalia Jackson, maybe the best performance in a movie filled with incredible performances. It’s on Hulu, but should be seen in a theater, unless you have a huge screen and big speakers. 

What makes Mavis Staples so great goes beyond her voice, or even her ability to interpret a song. She somehow is able to mix the gospel music she grew up on, with secular soul music and the protest and message music of the 1960s and beyond, and do it in a way that is both uplifting and surprisingly sexy (without being trashy). 

Her first No. 1 pop hit, “I’ll Take You There,” with her family group The Staple Singers, is a great example of this mix—and more. Recorded at the Muscle Shoals Studio and featuring the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (Eddie Hinton on lead guitar, David Hood on bass, Barry Beckett on piano, Roger Hawkins on drums, with additional guitar from Jimmy Johnson and Raymond Banks), with the Memphis Horns dubbed in later, its message can be interpreted as laying out the path to heaven, or to a world where the civil rights movement—still active when the song was released in 1972—had succeeded. And there’s something in Mavis’ delivery (much of which was ad libbed), which indicates that maybe she’s offering to lead to somewhere more private. 

What I didn’t know is that the introduction to the song and much of the melody and arrangement, are borrowed from/influenced by a reggae song, “The Liquidator,” by the Harry J Allstars. Check it out here. Al Bell, one of the owners of Stax Records, who wrote and produced the song, had brought a copy of “The Liquidator” to the sessions and played it for the musicians, who thought it was a demo, and not an actual released song. David Hood said, "The Liquidator thing, we didn't know what that was. As I recall, [Bell] came in and brought what they call a dub. It was like an acetate or something, a disk that you put on the record player and play. And it had no lyrics on it. We just thought it was an instrumental track that somebody had done for a song. And it was only years later when I found out that that had been a record." 

As we know from Seuras’ piece about the Muscle Shoals/Traffic connection, members of the rhythm section, including Hood and Hawkins, toured with Traffic, who regularly listened to Island labelmate Bob Marley and the Wailers’ album Catch A Fire, and as Hood recalled, "We kept hearing that. I thought, 'Wow, this is the greatest, wildest music I've ever heard.’" In fact, reggae influences permeate the entire album that “I’ll Take You There,” was on, Be Altitude: Respect Yourself.

Finally, here’s a nice piece by David Hood’s son Patterson, who you probably know from his regular job with Drive-By Truckers, about growing up in the Muscle Shoals area (including finding out that his father was the bass player on “I’ll Take You There”), and much more. Patterson’s a fine prose writer, as well as a great songwriter (which you probably know, if you’ve read my stuff here and elsewhere).

Mail: Take A Letter Maria

R.B. Greaves: Take A Letter Maria 

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I’ve written in the past about how I started paying attention to music in 1969. as a result of hearing WABC, the classic New York Top 40 station, in the station wagon that took me to my summer day camp. And that fall, I have a vague recognition of being in the car with my mother, and hearing “Take A Letter Maria” on our car radio, and proclaiming it a hit. I was 8 years old, and already thought that I was a music critic. And here I am, more than 50 years later, still pretending to be a music critic of sorts. 

The funny thing is that my 8 year old self was right. “Take A Letter Maria” became a No. 2 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, blocked from the top spot by The 5th Dimension’s “Wedding Bell Blues,” also a great song. 

I’d be shocked if anyone reading this doesn’t know the song—it is sung from the perspective of a man who had just learned of his wife’s infidelity, and dictates a letter to his secretary, the titular Maria, informing his wife of their separation. At the end, he asks Maria to dinner. It’s a surprisingly peppy song, considering the subject matter, with Latin influences and mariachi horns. I think that the narrator is supposed to come off as a sympathetic character, trying to recover from the discovery that his marriage is over, and he’s been cuckolded. And overall, I think that holds up today, despite the fact that he breaks up with his wife by letter (the functional equivalent of the uncool breakup by text), and the fact that in today’s environment, asking out Maria would raise questions of power differentials and sexual harassment. To be fair, we don’t know whether Maria accepted the invitation. Also, I have to admit that the fact that he instructs Maria to “send a copy to my lawyer” makes me happy. 

“Take A Letter Maria” was written and recorded by R.B. Greaves, and I’d be shocked if most of the people reading this knew that, and if they did, if they knew anything else about Greaves. 

Greaves, who was the nephew of the great Sam Cooke, was raised on a Seminole reservation, but moved to England in 1963. A few years later, performing as Sonny Childe, and fronting a band called The TNT, Greaves became a popular live soul/R&B act in England and recorded a few singles, before leaving The TNT during the summer of 1967. (Without Childe/Greaves, The TNT became the backing band for P.P. Arnold, probably best known for her versions of “The First Cut is the Deepest” and “Angel of the Morning.”) 

Greaves’ big hit was recorded at the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, and featured the house musicians, including Donna Jean Thatcher (probably better known from her days with the Grateful Dead as Donna Jean Godchaux), Eddie Hinton, Jimmy Johnson and David Hood. And it was produced by Atlantic Records head Ahmet Ertegun (not even close to being best known as my ultimate boss during the summer of 1982). 

Greaves’ followup, a cover of the Bacharach/David song, “Always Something There to Remind Me,” stalled at No. 27 on the Billboard chart, and that, pretty much, was that for Greaves, although he continued recording into the 1970s. He died of prostate cancer in September 2012 at the age of 68.

Patterson Hood, of the Drive-By Truckers, who is the son of David Hood, the bass player on “Maria,” has covered the song during solo shows, sometimes with his father on bass. Here’s one such performance, in which Patterson talks about how the Rolling Stones wanted to record in Muscle Shoals in 1969, before leaving to perform at Altamont, and that on that day, Greaves recorded “Maria” during the day, and the Stones appeared at night to record “Brown Sugar.”