How did the Staple Singers form?
It started with Pops. He grew up in Mississippi, one of 14 children, and after dinner they would go out on the porch and sing harmonies, and people from all around would come to listen. Then Pops moved to Chicago and he sang in an all-male group called the Trumpet Jubilees. Each week he’d go to sing and no one would show up, and he would come home disgusted. And he’d go back the next week and the same thing would happen. And by the third week when this happened, he came home, headed straight to the closet where he had a guitar he’d bought at the pawnshop, and he calls us children into the living room, sits us on the floor in a circle and begins giving us voice parts to sing for “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” These were the same parts he and his brothers and sisters
