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 …”

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.