Roebuck Staples Blues Otits By: Greg Johnson Article Reprint from the February 2001 BluesNotes      Blues in History Index                          Related Links

    One of the saddest tasks of being a source for Blues information lies in the role of reporting on those who have passed on.   Many performers have touched our lives throughout the years, but alas, nobody is immortal and everybody's time eventually must come to an end.   It is with a heavy heart that we relay the news of the deaths of three more much-beloved musicians who have left us for the hereafter.

    Roebuck Staples was born on December 2, 1915, the 13th of 14 children, in Winona, Mississippi.  Better known to the world as Pop, he was the patriarch of the musical family, The Staple Singers, blending the sounds of Gospel, Blues, Folk and Soul into hit singles such as "Respect Yourself" and "I'll Take You There."  The Staple Singers charted hit singles 12 times in their heyday with Stax Records during the late-'60s, early-'70s.  In his lifetime, Pop Staples worked with a virtual who's who in the music industry. People such as Curtis Mayfield, Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, all recorded with him, but he also played alongside early Blues greats such as Robert Johnson, Son House and Charley Patton, as a young man in the Mississippi Delta. In the mid-1990s, Pop released two albums as a solo artist for the first time and was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album for 1994's "Father Father."  Pop Staples died at the age of 85 on December 19th in a hospital in Dolton, Illinois, following a concussion that he had suffered from a fall earlier that week.

Related Links:

• Roebuck Staples at the All Music Guide

• Find Roebuck Staples recordings at CD-DB

• Dogpile Mega-search for Roebuck Staples

© 2001 Cascade Blues Association