(Morristown, NJ) -- Grammy Award-winning legend Mavis Staples teams up with multi-platinum recording artist Joan Osborne on the highly anticipated national tour, "Solid Soul." The tour comes to Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown on Tuesday, November 3, 2015 at 8 pm. Tickets are $29-$69.
From her early days with the iconic Staple Singers, when she was on top of the charts with songs like the 1972 #1 hit "I'll Take You There," to her recent albums with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, Mavis Staples has been a leader in American music for six decades. The "Solid Soul" tour marks her first tour collaboration with Joan Osborne, the widely celebrated singer-songwriter who dominated Top 40 radio with her hit song "One of Us," and whose albums have garnered seven Grammy nominations.
Unlike many tour packages, where two artists tour together but perform their own shows, this tour will be a combined show, with lots of interaction between the two legends.
Mavis Staples
There are few living musicians who can lay claim to being the voice of America’s conscience, and even fewer who continue to make vital music. For six decades Mavis Staples has been the solid rock of American music. Alongside the family group she is so identified with, the Staple Singers, Mavis has managed to transform herself as she goes, yet never alter.
From the delta-inflected gospel sound she helped create in the 1950s ("Uncloudy Day"), to the engaged protest of the civil rights era ("Freedom Highway"), and then, amazingly, on pop radio in the 1970s with a series of chart hits (“I’ll Take You There,” “Respect Yourself,” "Let's Do It Again") -- through all these, Mavis carried on, her warm embrace of a voice the only constant.
On their second collaboration, the Grammy-nominated 2013 album "One True Vine," the legendary singer and her producer, Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy, have crafted a gospel album for the 21st century. On the record, Mavis gives voice to something new in her repertoire, something deeper and more resonant with our times. Where her Stax-era hits spoke for a growing black social consciousness, and her seventies collaborations with The Band gave spiritual weight to the rediscovery of traditional American music, Jeff Tweedy has crafted a pulpit from which Mavis lends her voice to a search for grace.
Staples is a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner, and a National Heritage Fellowship Award recipient. VH1 named her one of the 100 Greatest Women of Rock and Roll, and Rolling Stone listed her as one of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. Her previous album, the Tweedy-produced "You Are Not Alone," won the Grammy Award for Best Americana Album in 2011, adding a remarkable new chapter to an already historic career.
Yvonne Staples, backing vocals from 1969 until patriarch Roebuck 'Pops' Staples' death in 2000, the Staple Singers were configured as a quartet, with Pops and Mavis joined by Cleotha and Yvonne Staples. The clan’s musical signatures were Pops gospel-based songwriting, reedy tenor and bluesy guitar, Mavis’ rich, raspy vocals and precise phrasing, and the supple, ringing harmonies of Cleotha and Yvonne, who also acted as the band's manager.
Joan Osborne
Joan Osborne has rightfully earned a reputation as one of the great voices of her generation — both a commanding, passionate performer and a frank, emotionally evocative songwriter. A multi-platinum selling recording artist and seven-time Grammy nominee, the soulful vocalist is a highly sought-after collaborator and guest performer who has performed alongside many notable artists, including Bob Dylan, Luciano Pavarotti, Stevie Wonder, Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal, and Patti Smith to name a few.
Counting such legendary artists as Etta James and Ray Charles as influences, Osborne has released several acclaimed albums and continues to tour extensively with her own band and in various configurations, such as when she joined forces in 2003 with the surviving members of The Grateful Dead when they regrouped to tour as The Dead. In addition to her own solo shows and guest appearances, Osborne currently tours as a member of the rock/soul supergroup Trigger Hippy, founded by Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman and built from each musician’s shared love of R&B and soul. The band’s self-titled debut album will arrive this fall.
Osborne is widely known for her live performances in the Grammy Award-winning documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown which have received rave reviews from fans and critics alike. She has produced two albums for Americana stalwarts the Holmes Brothers, and co-produced her last two critically acclaimed solo records, Love And Hate, and Bring It On Home, with talented producer/multi-instrumentalist Jack Petruzzelli.
Bring It On Home, which found Osborne tackling vintage songs by Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, Al Green, Ike and Tina Turner, and Sonny Boy Williamson (among others), and treating them with respect while giving them some interesting twists in tempo, key and feeling, garnered a Best Blues Album nomination at the 2013 Grammy Awards.
Bring It On Home reminded the singer of what music is all about. “There’s a texture and richness to these songs that singers don’t have right away, that I didn’t have when I started out,” Osborne says. “But the more I’ve done this, the more tone and depth I’ve developed. This was the time. These songs, they’re a remedy—they get me out of my head. These songs put the music back in my heart and my soul.”
Osborne’s latest recording, Love and Hate, is one of the most personally-charged, creatively ambitious efforts of her two-decades-plus recording career. While she has long established herself as one of the world’s most respected vocalists, her soulful songcraft reaches a new level of musical and lyrical resonance on Love and Hate. Such insightful, emotionally complex new compositions as "Where We Start," "Work On Me," "Kitten's Got Claws," "Keep It Underground" and the pointed title track survey some of the more complicated terrain of romantic relationships, in a manner that's rarely been attempted in popular music, while the album's intimate, stripped-down sound marks a stylistic departure from the gritty blues-based rock for which Osborne is best known.
"I feel like each song on this album talks about a different aspect of love," she says. "Love isn't just one thing; it encompasses faith, passion, power struggles, humor, anguish, spirituality, lust, anger, everything on that spectrum…so I tried to come up with songs that were about different aspects of this continuum. This record is like the novel that sat in the author's drawer for 50 years…more than any record I've ever done, it felt like it needed the time to change and evolve and become what it was supposed to be.”
Osborne continues to enjoy a long and storied career that was jumpstarted with the great success of her major- label debut album, Relish, which wove together strands of American roots music, poetic lyrics and impassioned vocals, and produced the massive MTV and international radio smash, "One of Us.” The song occupied the number one spot on the U.S. singles chart for two weeks, Relish eventually racked up sales of over three million copies, and Osborne found a large and appreciative audience, particularly during touring as part of Sarah McLachlan’s Lilith Fair tour.
Although the Kentucky native grew up with a passion for music, when she arrived in New York City in the late 1980s, it was to attend New York University's prestigious film school. But she couldn't resist the pull of the city's live music scene for long, and soon she was performing her own songs in downtown rock clubs and emerging as a popular presence in a vibrant scene of rootsy new acts that included such then-unknowns as Jeff Buckley, Chris Whitley, Blues Traveler and the Spin Doctors. In 1992, Osborne launched her own indie label, Womanly Hips, and released the live Soul Show: Live at Delta 88 and the studio EP Blue Million Miles. Becoming a regional success led her to the signing of a major label deal and the success of Relish. But Osborne quickly made it clear that she was more interested in musical integrity and creative longevity than transient pop success, and she made that point repeatedly with such subsequent albums as 2000's Righteous Love, 2002's How Sweet It Is, 2005’s Christmas Means Love, 2006's Pretty Little Stranger, 2007's Breakfast in Bed, and 2008's Little Wild One up through her two latest releases, 2012’s Bring It On Home, and 2014’s Love And Hate.
"I'm getting better at what I do," Osborne observes. "I can look at the songs on Love and Hate and realize that it's better than I could have done 15 or 20 years ago. I have an audience that I've built up over time, and I feel like they're with me. And because of that, I don't feel any pressure to fit myself into anyone else's idea of what I should be doing. So I feel like I can write my own rules at this point. That can be scary, but it's also liberating, and it's an exciting place to be."
