Staples Jr. Singers

Co-presented by Luaka Bop.

The Staples Jr. Singers—the stage namesake of the Browns, a family of ten hailing from the small rural town of Aberdeen, Mississippi—were part of a vanguard of soul gospel artists from the 1970s that broke from tradition to testify with groove. The siblings were barely teenagers when they started in 1969, building a reputation by playing school talent shows and front yards near their hometown on the banks of the Tombigbee River. Soon, they were piling into their family van every weekend, performing sometimes as many as three shows in a single day, and touring with regional acts on the gospel circuit.

The Browns got their big break in 1975, when a traveling gospel singer Joe Orr introduced them to a now long-gone recording studio in Tupelo run by a man named “Big John.” They laid down the tracks that became When Do We Get Paid, thirteen cuts that range from barnstorming, mirthful testaments to raw, trance-like blues, selling their handful of copies at shows and from their front lawn. The album, with its big turbulent sound and bombastic cover and title, gained a coveted reputation among record collectors. In 2022, Luaka Bop reissued the album to significant acclaim, and the core remaining siblings (R.C and Edward Brown of the Brown Singers, Annie Brown Caldwell of the Annie Caldwell Singers) began to reunite for shows under the Staples Jr. moniker for the first time in decades. ‘

Now, on the eve of the release of their long-awaited follow-up Searching (Luaka Bop, June 2024), recorded in a single-room church called The Message Center in West Point, Mississippi, the Staples Jr. Singers make a miraculous appearance in Brooklyn.