Annie & The Caldwells
Can’t Lose My (Soul)
★★★★
LUAKA BOP
Eighty years ago, in April 1945, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was Number 2 on the Billboard “race records” chart with Strange Things Happening Every Day – fair comment for the month in which Franklin D Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler all died. There were also several noteworthy musical events: Richard Strauss completed Metamorphosen; Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel opened; the audience at a hometown performance by the Berlin Philharmonic were offered cyanide as they left the auditorium; and Tharpe’s hit was the first gospel record to reach that Billboard countdown.
Often cited as the earliest rock’n’roll track, Strange Things Happening Every Day was a genuine attempt to assuage critics who complained that Tharpe was targeting secular audiences. By 1964, when she appeared at a disused Manchester railway station for British television, rock, soul and gospel were three discrete genres… though you wouldn’t have known that from her performance. That trinity continue to pick each other’s pockets, and while some acts have kept a foot in all camps, many are convinced you can only be in one. Others quietly keep an eye on what the competition is up to.
Miss Annie Brown Caldwell is, according to her children, “old school”, a purist, yet the family septet she fronts are anything but. Their music is influenced by Aretha Franklin, Al Green and George Clinton while belonging to the lineage of gospel groups – The Ward Singers, say – who foregrounded personal emotions over communal jubilation, or, like Sam Cooke’s Soul Stirrers, brought electric guitar to a traditionally a cappella format. The Caldwells harbour no fear, however, about making the connections explicit: where Chaka Khan sang Ain’t Nobody, they bring the house down live with Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus.
Their music bridges the divide: the bass playing of eldest son Willie Jr is the very definition of ‘elastic’, allowing his vocalist sisters to let their backbones slip; brother Abel lays down a rock-solid beat, steadfast in the knowledge that someone in front of him may get a notion to rhapsodise without warning; and William Sr, Annie’s husband, sits quietly to the side, nodding towards Teenie Hodges, Cornell Dupree and Eddie Hazell.
Upfront, is Miss Annie herself, preaching from the depths of her soul and demanding you come with her. The title track epitomises this approach: as a composition, it’s little more than two minutes long, built on a walking blues; but then Miss Annie starts improvising – “I ain’t going to Hell, y’all” – warning listeners to walk a righteous path, and the call-and-response between mother and daughters builds for another eight minutes.
Behind her stands Deborah (pronounced D’Bora), a whirlwind whose starting point is No More Drama levels of Mary J Blige-like fire and brimstone, letting the spirit move through her until she lies drained and barefoot on the floor at the end of a show. Wrong, the most straightforward cut on the album, finds Deborah lamenting choices she made after discovering her husband had been slipping and sliding behind her back. The family that prays together, however, stays together: beside her are her sister Anjessica and Miss Annie’s goddaughter Toni Rivers – like Abel, they are the rocks upon which this church is built.
At home in West Point, Mississippi, the Caldwells have been a closely guarded secret for more than 25 years, recording two CDs for the Memphis-based Ecko label (Answer Me in 2013, We Made It five years later) and playing around America’s Southeast. Half a century ago, however, Miss Annie had been in another family group, The Staples Jr Singers, along with her siblings, and it was after a copy of their debut, When Do We Get Paid, came to the attention of David Byrne that the story started to get interesting. When that was reissued on Luaka Bop in 2022, Miss Annie raised the idea of doing something with her second family’s material.
The six tracks here all appeared in different guises on the Ecko albums. Then, however, the goal was to take the gospel songs and give them an aspirational smoothness and an appeal beyond their obvious audience. Here, they are stripped back, letting the raw essence rise to the surface and evoking the strength of feeling that comes through their live performances. There’s the swing of Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club, the search for ecstasy of the Family Stone at Woodstock, the power of Aretha Franklin at LA’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church and the fervour of Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples at 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival.
Making the Caldwells comfortable had a lot to do with that: the label set up their studio in The Message Center, the West Point church where Willie Sr plays guitar on Sundays, and producer Ahmed Abdullahi Gallab – aka Sinkane, who had been part of Luaka Bop’s William Onyeabor tribute, The Atomic Bomb Band – has taken a hands-off approach. “The goal,” he says, “was always to stay true to the feeling behind the music.” Easier said than done: this is a group who purposely do not rehearse, relying instead on family intuition and the guidance of the Lord.
Perhaps making a traditional gospel album was not on Luaka Bop’s agenda, but Can’t Lose My (Soul) positions their new signings at the heart of the territory Tharpe occupied when she sang Didn’t It Rain in Chorlton in May 1964, still holding strong to the traditions of call-and-response that were brought from Africa, but with added influences from the six decades since. I Made It is the Caldwells’ I Will Survive, a disco number in which Miss Annie wards off Satan’s bombs; I’m Going To Rise – which feels like a Hot Buttered Soul outtake – tells how not even death will keep Annie in the ground.
The world has changed, of course, and not everyone will seek reassurance in the Caldwells’ beliefs. But the message of suffering and survival on the road to salvation may just get you through any darkness looming on the horizon… or simply get you dancing. Strange things still happen every day; just ask Sister Rosetta.
Can’t Lose. My (Soul) is out 21 March on Luaka Bop.
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