Gospel legends the Staple Singers say let's do it again with two albums

Occasionally, for reasons of fate or coincidence, sounds from the past converge in the present at key moments. Consider The Staple Singers, whose gospel recordings starting in the early 1960s carried them through the next four decades and included secular pop hits I'll Take You There and Let's Do It Again.

Lauded by musical aesthetes but less known among the public, the family quartet and its founder-patriarch, Roebuck "Pops" Staples, have recently attracted new attention that serves as a reminder that history sometimes needs a few decades - and unexpected nudges - to catch up with innovators.

There was Bob Dylan's mention last month of The Staple Singers during his MusiCares Person of the Year speech, in which he praised the quartet - then composed of Pops and children Mavis, Yvonne and Pervis - for recording some of his early songs. Calling them "one of my favourite groups of all time", Dylan credited the Staples, and specifically Pervis, for carrying his work to their fans. "They were the type of artists that I wanted recording my songs," he said.

A few months earlier, during the final episode of The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert signed off with a seeming non sequitur when acknowledging the thousands of guests who appeared on his show: "I've just got too many to thank. So you know what? I'll just thank Mavis Staples. Mavis, if you could just call everybody tomorrow, that would be great."

It was as though some force were propelling The Staple Singers into the public consciousness again, timed to coincide with the arrival of a pair of resurrected recordings. A remastered, extended reissue of their momentous live album Freedom Highway: Live at the New Nazareth Missionary Baptist Church 1965 documents a Chicago performance cum civil rights rally in the weeks after the Selma march, and the posthumous release of Don't Lose This, the final record from Pops, finished with the help of the Wilco recording studio's Jeff Tweedy and his son Spence 15 years after the patriarch's death.

"Pops was something else, I tell you," says Mavis, now 75. Before he died, she promised her father to guard the recording. She did that and more. "The record sounds good, and I've been getting good feedback, and I'm just so grateful. I can relax now. I've done what I'm supposed to do. I've done what he asked me to do: 'Don't lose this.'"