_The Staple Singers didn’t get started until ten years after the family patriarch, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, moved the clan from Winona, Mississippi, to Chicago in 1936. His children grew up in the North and learned to sing there, and yet they ended up echoing the deep Southern timbre of their father.

Just listen to their early version of the old hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” on Vee-Jay Records. This isn’t the piano-driven, rafter-raising, urban gospel of Mahalia Jackson, another Southern transplant to Chicago; this is guitar-driven, twangy, back-country Delta music. It still sounds like nothing else in the gospel field.

“I was a member of a family of sixteen, my mother, father, seven girls, seven boys,” Pops recalls. “When we got done with the cotton chopping in the afternoon and dinner in the evening, we’d get together in the yard and start singing church songs. The moon would be shining bright, and the echo would ring out across the fields. People would hear us, and they’d come from east, west, north, and south. We’d have thirty people singing out in the yard, just to amuse ourselves.

“Later, when I was a young man, I played the blues on the chitlin’ circuit down there. I knew Howlin’ Wolf as a young man,” he adds. “He’s still my favorite blues singer—I picked up the blues from him and from Charley Patton, and some other fellows who never recorded.

“But when I moved up to Chicago, I didn’t want to play the blues anymore. I wanted my family to be like my parents’ family, so we only sang church songs. I sat my children down and taught them their parts just like my family had learned their parts. They loved it. Then a man had a guitar he wanted to sell, so I bought it, and I learned to play gospel songs on the guitar. That’s why the Staple Singers don’t sound like any other group. We have that old country sound, that Southern style of singing, and I kept that blues feel in my guitar playing.”

When the Staple Singers transformed themselves from an old-fashioned gospel group into a trailblazing pop-protest group, the inspiration came not from such South Side Chicago neighbors as Curtis Mayfield and Sam Cooke but from an Alabama preacher.

“I was working in a steel mill in Chicago,” Pops remembers, “when I heard this minister on the radio. His name was Martin Luther King, Jr., and he was saying what I wanted to say and was saying it like I wanted to say it. He was doing something if I had tried to do down in Mississippi when I was a boy, I would have been mobbed right away. I called him up in Alabama, and he permitted me to come to his church down there. I told him, ‘You’re preaching the same thing we’re trying to sing about. If you don’t mind, we’d like to go on your movement with you.’ ”

Daughter Mavis Staples picks up the story. “Back at the hotel, Pops said, ‘I really like that man and what he has to say. If he can preach it, we can sing it. If we get ourselves a rhythm section, we can get the kids to listen to what we’re saying.’

“So we got a rhythm section and started writing songs about the movement—‘Why Am I Treated So Bad?’ was about Little Rock; ‘Marching Up Jesus’ Highway’ was about Selma.”

“I saw Dr. King in Memphis a few nights before he died,” Pop continues, “and he said, ‘Brother Staples, play my favorite song.’ I said, ‘What’s your favorite song?’ and he said, ‘Why Am I Treated So Bad?’ To this day, I still sing it every night in honor of him. I still miss him.”