Choking Kind. Mavis Staples. 1969. Volt.

 Written by Nashville stalwart Harlan Howard in 1967, Choking Kind appeared that year as an RCA issued single by Waylon Jennings. Two years and a clutch of  distinct variations later, the song shows up on Mavis Staples’ eponymously titled debut record on Volt. From a twenty first century perspective, the two recordings play out like a genre exercise in bias confirmation, fulfilling long held expectations that surround country and western’s idealization of the status quo, its tendency to court market success by often—but not always—reimagining verisimilitude through a personal lens of stasis. In 2024, we call this style conservatism. Mavis Staples’ artistry is kinetic. Her singing voice, like Jennings’, has the power to connect viscerally with an audience without overwhelming you. The major difference between versions is vocal narration. By means of tempo and voice control, Jennings reduces the action of the world around him to a couple’s personal drama, allowing the prevailing emotion of his performance, tenderness, to shadow with faux poignancy what is essentially an emotionless, one-sided breakup. Staples, working with Booker T and the MGs, blows her arrangement wide open, inviting the whole world in. Her typically gorgeous voice, the sexiest in all of rhythm and blues, addresses both the song’s possessive lover and, through the sheer exuberance of her performance, the pop audience, too, with whom she shares an extraordinary amity. In the popular imagination, the concept of American Christian faith can be exemplified by that stunning moment in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll when a minor character’s name is called, and she emerges, singing “I Shall Not Be Moved.” But secular reality calls for movement, a biological sine qua non that we’ve pushed, in this century and the last one, into so many directions we’ve shattered the compass. Recorded in the echo of fresh gunfire, Staples’ Choking Kind illuminates a way out of bloodshed by unifying her listenership in the beneficence of American rhythm and blues, with its distinctive sensuality that redefines ebullient glamour as flowing organically from the artistic expression of middle class inspiration. Mavis Staples refused the status of untouchability that serves the star class, and she doesn’t sing with the voice of the people; her singing voice holds the full bodied timbre of humanity, and she’s one of the American vocalists—Johnny Cash is another—who dazzlingly transcends the moral limitations of Church based talents to embrace our life-affirming sensual world. In this battle upon Tennessee soil for the hearts of music lovers, Memphis inner city progressivism wins the day.

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