From West Point, Mississippi
Recommended if you like The Harlem Gospel Travelers, DJ Greg Belson’s Divine Disco compilations
Up next Single, Wrong, on 28 January. As-yet untitled debut album to follow
On Instagram, you can find a clip of Annie and the Caldwells’ recent appearance at Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht: one of the band’s first performances outside America’s deep south. The Dutch festival is admirably eclectic and boundary-pushing – the bill this year ranged from Japanese noise-rockers Bo Ningen re-imagining the soundtrack of Jodorowsky’s 1973 surrealist classic The Holy Mountain to the self-styled “putrid, drug-filled gutter rock” of New York quintet Couch Slut – but even so, Annie and the Caldwells’ appearance looks extraordinary: a mother and her three middle-aged daughters, clad in matching multicoloured harlequin-print dresses, belting out raw, disco-tinged soul gospel in the midst of a delirious stage invasion by ecstatic, dancing punters.
“It was just beautiful,” says Annie Caldwell down the phone from her home in West Point, Mississippi. “The lord, you know, he’s not just in the church buildings, he’s going to highways and byways – wherever he sends us, we’re willing to go, because a lot of people aren’t going to come to church. I heard people say that they felt something they never felt before, and that makes them believe more in what we believe in, and that is lord God almighty.”
Eagle-eyed viewers with an interest in obscure gospel might recognise Annie Caldwell from the Staples Jr Singers, the band she formed with her brothers in the 70s, whose solitary 1975 album When Do We Get Paid was rescued from obscurity and reissued to wild acclaim in 2022. Annie and the Caldwells are the band she subsequently formed in the 1980s with her guitarist husband, Willie, after hearing their daughters rehearsing for a talent show: they were singing secular material, which she didn’t like the sound of. “I said: let me get those girls before the devil gets them!”
With the band rounded out by their sons on bass and drums and Caldwell, a dress shop owner by day, in charge of the band’s wardrobe (which she accurately describes as “jazzy”), they spent decades performing in churches around Mississippi and occasionally recording demos, a few collections of which are on Spotify. Then David Byrne’s label Luaka Bop – which had reissued the Staples Jr Singers album – suggested they make an album proper. “We recorded it in a little church on the corner of the street from where I live,” Caldwell says. “There was so much power and spirit within that place, and I thank God for that – he really came in and started blessing us.”
It is a fantastic album – funky, gritty and powerful, packed with incredible singing and potent songs that cast a stark eye over life’s hardships. Nevertheless, it must be odd, releasing a debut album 40 years after you start performing. But Caldwell seems unfazed. “Ever since I was young, God let me know that this was going to happen,” she says. “I have to give him praise and thank him that he remembered me after all these years.”
