Review

Belief

Culture

Music

Race

11 April 2025

5 min read

Annie Caldwell: “My family is my band”

A force of nature voice that comes from the soul.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A family group stand and sit for a photo.

Family album.

The Caldwells.

They say that good things come to those who wait. Annie Caldwell is someone who has experienced the truth of that proverb.

The album she and her siblings (known as the Staples Jr. Singers) made and paid for themselves in 1975 sold only a few hundred copies but, when reissued in 2022, was received as a stone-cold classic and led to the recording of a second album 49 years after the first. Now, her other group, Annie and the Caldwells, have released their major label debut to rave reviews, 30 years after they first began performing.

Annie Brown was 11 when the Staples Jr. Singers was formed in honour of Pops and Mavis Staples of the famed Chicago soul-gospel group, The Staples Singers. The siblings gained popularity at churches and functions throughout the American South and Midwest, being mentored by Mississippi greats like Lee Williams and Spiritual QCs.

Back then, the South was desegregated on paper but not always in practice. Their parents found refuge and support in the church against the backdrop of an unwelcoming town (and nation), while the children found refuge and a greater purpose in life in the music. They were influenced by what they saw - the backlash after desegregation, Civil Rights - and wrote music with messages of community and social justice. “All the songs we were singing about,” said Annie’s brother Edward Brown, “We were going through it.”

The Staples Jr. Singers got to make a single record together, one which, because of its rarity, became coveted by gospel soul collectors: When Do We Get Paid. They paid for the record themselves and pressed a few hundred copies, selling most of them on their front lawn to their neighbours. On its re-release in 2022, The Guardian called their socially conscious gospel album “Powerful,” and UNCUT said that it was “music that deserves your attention.”

As a result, the Staples Jr. Singers finally had their time in the sun, including multiple European tours. Annie spoke then about being able to “do many things that we didn’t get the chance to do in the beginning of life … Because the time and money wasn’t there. It all came late, being in our sixties now—but it looks like it’s just beginning, you know? Life is just beginning for us.” She concluded that: “God has blessed us and opened up doors that we couldn’t even see,” and said that, “If I can help just one person, I know that I’m not singing in vain.”

They play a powerful disco soul and delivering energetic and moving musical testimonies that blend the fiery sounds of gospel with the slow groove of soul.

One warm evening in October 2023, the family gathered in a single-room church in West Point, Mississippi, called The Message Center to record their second album Searching. There, across the street from Annie’s house, they played songs they had written nearly fifty years before and did so together with four generations of their musical family. The original three Staples Jr. Singers, Edward, R.C., and Annie, were joined by some of the new vanguard: Edward’s son Troy on backing vocals, R.C.’s son Gary on bass, and R.C.’s grandson Jaylin on drums. “It was good to be able to go back,” said Annie, “and look back over our life. Some of the same songs that we had sung, those songs have a new meaning to me.”

“The process was very easy,” said producer Ahmed Gallab, who performs as the artist Sinkane. “There’s nothing like a family bond/band. It was so special to watch how locked into each other everyone was. You can hear and feel that on this record.” He concluded: “I feel like I was able to witness part of this family’s continued story and legacy in real time. That was a very special thing to witness.”

Annie and the Caldwells is also a family band, being led by Annie and her husband of the last fifty years Willie Joe Caldwell, Sr. (who plays guitar). Annie says, “My family is my band”: she is backed by their daughters Deborah Caldwell Moore and Anjessica Caldwell and goddaughter Toni Rivers; their eldest son Willie Jr. Caldwell is on the bass and youngest son Abel Aquirius Caldwell is on the drums.

Annie traces the genesis of the band back to the moment she heard her daughters sing at a talent show: “They were really good. I said, ‘Let me get those girls before the devil gets them!’ Because I was raised up in gospel, so I think you should use what the Lord gave you for good. I decided to raise them with the values my father taught me – singing for the Lord.”

They generally play on weekends, so for their day jobs Willie Jr. drives a forklift, Abel Aquirius drives hospital patients, Anjessica works in customer care for an insurance company, Toni is an elementary school teacher, and Deborah does hair. Annie runs a clothing store on Main Street called Caldwell Fashions, which has been a beloved staple for women dressing for COGIC (Church Of God In Christ ) convocations and anniversaries since the 1980s.

Prior to the latest album, they released two albums under Ecko, a renowned soul and gospel label from Memphis. Influenced by The Gap Band, Chaka Kahn, and Bootsy Collins, they play a powerful disco soul and delivering energetic and moving musical testimonies that blend the fiery sounds of gospel with the slow groove of soul. Their music embodies the full power of gospel – the very kind The Message Center, where the family regularly performs, experiences on a weekly basis. The Message Center is also where Joe plays guitar every other Sunday, and where his father used to be a deacon.

Like Searching, Can’t Lose My (Soul) was also recorded at The Message Center and produced by Gallab. He has said of the recording session: “Hearing Annie’s voice for the first time was like witnessing something rare. Like you’re in the presence of a force of nature that’s been here long before you. It’s visceral, almost like it’s coming from her soul. You can feel every part of her life, every little piece of her journey, in each note she hits. It’s pure talent: no effort, no pretense, just real and raw.”

In his five-star review of the album for The Guardian, Alexis Petridis wrote: “These are great, powerful, moving songs, made all the more potent by the fact that they’re recorded live, without an audience, in a church … their message is ultimately one of hope. You don’t need to share the Caldwells’ faith to find something powerful and inspiring in that, particularly given the current climate, which can easily incline you towards hopelessness …”

Article

Assisted dying

Care

Culture

Death & life

13 November 2024

8 min read

The deceptive appeal of assisted dying changes medical practice

In Canada the moral ethos of medicine has shifted dramatically.

Ewan Goligher

Ewan is a physician practising in Toronto, Canada.

A tired-looking doctor sits at a desk dealing with paperwork.

Francisco Venâncio on Unsplash.

Once again, the UK parliament is set to debate the question of legalizing euthanasia (a traditional term for physician-assisted death). Political conditions appear to be conducive to the legalization of this technological approach to managing death. The case for assisted death appears deceptively simple—it’s about compassion, respect, empowerment, freedom from suffering. Who can oppose such positive goals? Yet, writing from Canada, I can only warn of the ways in which the embrace of physician-assisted death will fundamentally change the practice of medicine. Reflecting on the last 10 years of our experience, two themes stick out to me—pressure, and self-deception.

I still remember quite distinctly the day that it dawned on me that the moral ethos of medicine in Canada was shifting dramatically. Traditionally, respect for the sacredness of the patient’s life and a corresponding absolute prohibition on deliberately causing the death of a patient were widely seen as essential hallmarks of a virtuous physician. Suddenly, in a 180 degree ethical turn, a willingness to intentionally cause the death of a patient was now seen as the hallmark of patient-centered doctor. A willingness to cause the patient’s death was a sign of compassion and even purported self-sacrifice in that one would put the patient’s desires and values ahead of their own. Those of us who continued to insist on the wrongness of deliberately causing death would now be seen as moral outliers, barriers to the well-being and dignity of our patients. We were tolerated to some extent, and mainly out of a sense of collegiality. But we were also a source of slight embarrassment. Nobody really wanted to debate the question with us; the question was settled without debate.

Yet there was no denying the way that pressure was brought to bear, in ways subtle and overt, to participate in the new assisted death regime. We humans are unavoidably moral creatures, and when we come to believe that something is good, we see ourselves and others as having an obligation to support it. We have a hard time accepting those who refuse to join us. Such was the case with assisted death. With the loudest and most strident voices in the Canadian medical profession embracing assisted death as a high and unquestioned moral good, refusal to participate in assisted death could not be fully tolerated.

We deceive ourselves if we think that doctors have fully accepted that euthanasia is ethical when only very few are actually willing to administer it.

Regulators in Ontario and Nova Scotia (two Canadian provinces) stipulated that physicians who were unwilling to perform the death procedure must make an effective referral to a willing “provider”. Although the Supreme Court decision made it clear in their decision to strike down the criminal prohibition against physician-assisted death that no particular physician was under any obligation to provide the procedure, the regulators chose to enforce participation by way of this effective referral requirement. After all, this was the only way to normalize this new practice. Doctors don't ordinarily refuse to refer their patients for medically necessary procedures; if assisted death was understood to be a medically necessary good, then an unwillingness to make such referral could not be tolerated.

And this form of pressure brings us to the pattern of deception. First, it is deceptive to suggest that an effective referral to a willing provider confers no moral culpability on the referring physician for the death of the patient. Those of us who objected to referring the patient were told that like Pilate, we could wash our hands of the patient’s death by passing them along to someone else who had the courage to do the deed. Yet the same regulators clearly prohibited referral for female genital mutilation. They therefore seemed to understand the moral responsibility attached to an effective referral. Such glaring inconsistencies about the moral significance of a referral suggests that when they claimed that a referral avoided culpability for death by euthanasia, they were deceiving themselves and us.

The very need for a referral system signifies another self-deception. Doctors normally make referrals only when an assessment or procedure lies outside their technical expertise. In the case of assisted death, every physician has the requisite technical expertise to cause death. There is nothing at all complicated or difficult or specialized about assessing euthanasia eligibility criteria or the sequential administration of toxic doses of midazolam, propofol, rocuronium, and lidocaine. The fact that the vast majority of physicians are unwilling to perform this procedure entails that moral objection to participation in assisted death remains widespread in the medical profession. The referral mechanism is for physicians who are “uncomfortable” in performing the procedure; they can send the patient to someone else more comfortable. But to be comfortable in this case is to be “morally comfortable”, not “technically comfortable”. We deceive ourselves if we think that doctors have fully accepted that euthanasia is ethical when only very few are actually willing to administer it.

We deceived ourselves into thinking that assisted death is a medical therapy for a medical problem, when in fact it is an existential therapy for a spiritual problem.

There is also self-deception with respect to the cause of death. In Canada, when a patient dies by doctor-assisted death, the person completing the death certificate is required to record the cause of death as the reason that the patient requested euthanasia, not the act of euthanasia per se. This must lead to all sorts of moments of absurdity for physicians completing death certificates—do patients really die from advanced osteoarthritis? (one of the many reasons patients have sought and obtained euthanasia). I suspect that this practice is intended to shield those who perform euthanasia from any long-term legal liability should the law be reversed. But if medicine, medical progress, and medical safety are predicated on an honest acknowledgment about causes of death, then this form of self-deception should not be countenanced. We need to be honest with ourselves about why our patients die.

There has also been self-deception about whether physician-assisted death is a form of suicide. Some proponents of assisted death contend that assisted death is not an act of deliberate self-killing, but rather merely a choice over the manner and timing of one's death. It's not clear why one would try to distort language this way and deny that “physician-assisted suicide” is suicide, except perhaps to assuage conscience and minimize stigma. Perhaps we all know that suicide is never really a form of self-respect. To sustain our moral and social affirmation of physician-assisted death, we have to deny what this practice actually represents.

There has been self-deception about the possibility of putting limits around the practice of assisted death. Early on, advocates insisted that euthanasia would be available only to those for whom death was reasonably foreseeable (to use the Canadian legal parlance). But once death comes to be viewed as a therapeutic option, the therapeutic possibilities become nearly limitless. Death was soon viewed as a therapy for severe disability or for health-related consequences of poverty and loneliness (though often poverty and loneliness are the consequence of the health issues). Soon we were talking about death as a therapy for mental illness. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so is grievous and irremediable suffering. Death inevitably becomes therapeutic option for any form of suffering. Efforts to limit the practice to certain populations (e.g. those with disabilities) are inevitably seen as paternalistic and discriminatory.

There has been self-deception about the reasons justifying legalization of assisted death. Before legalization, advocates decry the uncontrolled physical suffering associated with the dying process and claim that prohibiting assisted death dehumanizes patients and leaves them in agony. Once legalized, it rapidly becomes clear that this therapy is not for physical suffering but rather for existential suffering: the loss of autonomy, the sense of being a burden, the despair of seeing any point in going on with life. The desire for death reflects a crisis of meaning. We deceived ourselves into thinking that assisted death is a medical therapy for a medical problem, when in fact it is an existential therapy for a spiritual problem.

We have also deceived ourselves by claiming to know whether some patients are better off dead, when in fact we have no idea what it's like to be dead. The utilitarian calculus underpinning the logic of assisted death relies on the presumption that we know what it is like before we die in comparison to what it is like after we die. In general, the unstated assumption is that there is nothing after death. This is perhaps why the practice is generally promoted by atheists and opposed by theists. But in my experience, it is very rare for people to address this question explicitly. They prefer to let the question of existence beyond death lie dormant, untouched. To think that physicians qua physicians have any expertise on or authority on the question of what it’s like to be dead, or that such medicine can at all comport with a scientific evidence-based approach to medical decision-making, is a profound self-deception.

Finally, we deceive ourselves when we pretend that ending people’s lives at their voluntary request is all about respecting personal autonomy. People seek death when they can see no other way forward with life—they are subject to the constraints of their circumstances, finances, support networks, and even internal spiritual resources. We are not nearly so autonomous as we wish to think. And in the end, the patient does not choose whether to die; the doctor chooses whether the patient should die. The patient requests, the doctor decides. Recent new stories have made clear the challenges for practitioners of euthanasia to pick and choose who should die among their patients. In Canada, you can have death, but only if your doctor agrees that your life is not worth living. However much these doctors might purport to act from compassion, one cannot help see a connection to Nazi physicians labelling the unwanted as “Lebensunwortes leben”—life unworthy of life. In adopting assisted death, we cannot avoid dehumanizing ourselves. Death with dignity is a deception.

These many acts of self-deception in relation to physician-assisted death should not surprise us, for the practice is intrinsically self-deceptive. It claims to be motivated by the value of the patient; it claims to promote the dignity of the patient; it claims to respect the autonomy of the patient. In fact, it directly contravenes all three of those goods.

It degrades the value of the patient by accepting that it doesn't matter whether or not the patient exists.

It denies the dignity of the patient by treating the patient as a mere means to an end—the sufferer is ended in order to end the suffering.

It destroys the autonomy of the patient because it takes away autonomy. The patient might autonomously express a desire for death, but the act of rendering someone dead does not enhance their autonomy; it obliterates it.

Yet the need for self-deception represents the fatal weakness of this practice. In time, truth will win over falsehood, light over darkness, wisdom over folly. So let us ever cling to the truth, and faithfully continue to speak the truth in love to the dying and the living. Truth overcomes pressure. The truth will set us free.