Freedom Highway Complete comes at a perfect time. It arrives not only as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the freedom marches from Selma to Montgomery, but also as we’re trying to figure out just how the honor that time through art. The response to the film Selma reminds us both how far we’ve come and how far we may have to go. Largely ignored during the Academy Awards — especially for the Best Actor and Best Director categories — the film did win an Oscar for John Legend and Common’s song “Glory”. The awards ceremony awarded the song to them just after the duo’s stirring live performance, one that brought the entire crowd to their feet and many to tears. It was a bracing moment, made all the stronger by the acceptance speeches by Common and John Legend.
For all the power of that moment, though, it was the next moment that reminded us how institutions can still trivialize the impact of those marches and the struggle for equality still going on. Scarlett Johansson came on stage and began speaking about the important events of 1965, mentioning the Selma marches but ending with, of course, the biggest event of all: the release of The Sound of Music. There followed a wonderful performance by Lady Gaga that returned us to the power of illusion, to a world that can distract us from what Martin Luther King Jr. and the freedom marches started, what the makers of Selma and others have tried to carry on. The sequencing of the show in that moment, and host Neil Patrick Harris’s penchant for using black actors as props in his jokes, was tone deaf at best, but at worst it distracted us from a moment that could have mattered more, that could have echoed louder.
Along with Selma, Freedom Highway Complete acts as both a commemoration of the fight for freedom and a corrective for all that distraction. The Staple Singers performed at the New Nazareth Church in Chicago just weeks after the marches, and their performance is staggering. Captured here for the first time in its entirety, it is equal parts joy and heartache, celebration and mourning, faithful gospel and defiant declaration of intent. This is a performance that can transfix without ignoring reality. This new, fully realized version of the night is just as striking and just as vibrant 50 years later.
It’s an amazing feat to consider that Pops Staples and his children — Pervis, Cleotha, Yvonne, and Mavis — launch into “When the Saints Go Marching In” after Pops’ benediction to open the show. That you think immediately of Selma more than, say, New Orleans, suggests the power of the performance. Driven by Pops’ rolling guitar work and Al Duncan’s muscled drums, which are bolstered by the congregation’s clapping, the song is a rousing start.
With songs like “We Shall Overcome”, the Staple Singers’ intent is clear. No song here is merely gospel, and no song is mere protest. These songs exist both in the middle of the fray and on the distant shore. “We Shall Overcome” is both powerful and heartbroken. Pops’ chords ripple with a chilling repetition, like the links in a chain, but the Singers pull at those chains at every turn. The band tempers the power of these songs with the stark loss, and possible redemption from that loss, in a harrowing version of “The Funeral” early on.
But these songs also lead up to the title track, one the Singers wrote in response to the marches. Its existence next to “We Shall Overcome” and “When The Saints Go Marching In” aligns it with a tradition while also suggesting the length and breadth of the struggle it responds to. It’s as lively a version of the song as you’ll ever hear. It’s easy to see what made this a hit, with its infectious energy, the impressive guitar lines, and the powerful singing. Here, though, it becomes something more than that. It’s the sound of solidarity. If the Singers “won’t turn around”, neither will the congregation that sings along at every turn.
In making this performance complete, this new version certainly adds music — like an excellently dusty version of “View the Holy City” — but mostly it fleshes out the night into something more than a concert. We hear a sermon from Dr. John E. Hopkins that makes explicit the ideas the songs work their way around. There’s an admittedly uncomfortable plea to the crowd for donations for the band, one that suggest this congregation does not reserve its challenges for those outside.
The impact of this complete evening of music and gospel suggests no division between performer and crowd. This is a community gathering. Billy Sherrill’s recording, originally editing and refined for radio play, is restored here to the almost chaotic sounds captured in the church itself. The levels here combine crowd and players, and while you can hear the stomp of feet, the distant shout of amens, the recording doesn’t put you in the moment as much as the music does. Instead, the recording and production suggest no difference between the Staple Singers and the congregation. They suggest something more cohesive, more dynamic, more inclusive, and more powerful.
Considering an awards night with months of planning and a history of whiteness can’t seem to get out of its own way, can’t help to update the systems it serves, Freedom Highway Complete arrives at an excellent time because, despite its key historical context, it still sounds of the moment as much now as then. It’s the sound of community taking up the mantle that those in power have set down. It’s the voice of the people speaking where the media that represents them has failed. That we still need this adds a bit of sadness to the experience of hearing this, to the commemoration of so much progress. Yet it’s the strength in these songs, in these voices, and in this gathering that wins out.