O · Song!

The Staples Singers - "The Weight"
(4:34, 6.1mb)
Track 6, The Best of the Staples Singers, 1990.

I've been going through a massive phase of liking The Band recently. I even bought their mid-70s covers album, "Moondog Matinee" the other day. I don't really know what it is about The Band that makes me want to listen to them (beyond the obvious, like the beautiful singing, Garth Hudson's organ playing, great songs, and so forth). It's something ineffable, some feeling in the music, in the playing, which communicates a certain seductive attitude towards the world.

In the Scorcese-directed film, The Last Waltz, about the Band's final concert (complete with big name guests - Dylan, Neil Young, etc etc), the Staples Singers sing a few verses of perhaps the best-known song by the Band, "The Weight". I was curious about the Staples Singers based on this performance, and I downloaded their greatest hits from eMusic. And the music of the Staples Singers has a similar ineffable feeling to it. It's an audible warmth and joy; it feels calming even when its frenetic.

The lyrics of "The Weight", written by Robbie Robertson, are mysterious nonsense, in the tradition of Bob Dylan (in fact, the song would fit perfectly on Dylan's contemporaneous John Wesley Harding); there is an impression of narrative, and there's a feeling of deeper, more portentous symbolism that you're somehow missing (i.e., that Weird Old America stuff Greil Marcus goes on about). In the Band's version of the song, some of this deep portent is inherent in the performance. It's a little weird and mysterious, and should be. The song has a deceptive simplicity; it's easy enough to play, but you suspect it really only works if you have the musical groove and the complex interaction of personalities that the Band or the Staples Singers have.

The gospel-derived singing style of the Staples Singers, however, gives the song/lyrics a different feel; it draws attention to words like "Nazareth" and "Moses" in the lyrics, to the symbolism of people and places named after biblical references. But more than that, the performance is fundamentally about the audible warmth and joy in the family's voices. There's something moving in the way that they combine in gospel harmony on the line "put the line right on me", sounding slightly cacophonous and beautiful, and briefly rejecting the laidback rhythmic groove for a more rigid pulse. Of course, one shouldn't forget the Stax rhythm section, who have a certain lust for life and groove in their playing.

tim.