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When Be Altitude: Respect Yourself appeared on Valentine's Day during that incredibly rich music year of 1972, the cover image featuring The Staple Singers standing inside the front of a jet engine clearly signaled the band was about to soar.  The Chicago-based gospel quintet, led by Roebuck "Pops" Staples and his children Cleotha, Mavis, Pervis and Yvonne, had been performing and recording since the early '60s, but realized the need to crossover to secular music's larger audience to give wider exposure to their spiritual life lessons and build a more financially successful career.  

Folk music influences flavored their initial forays in a more secular direction. Soon after, the ongoing struggle for racial justice in the 1960s became their fight as well. By the 1968 release of What They World Needs Now is Love, which contained covers of songs by Bob Dylan, Curtis Mayfield and Burt Bacharach/Hal David, the Staple Singers had become old hands at covering all manner of pop music, and that same year, the band, who had released records on a plethora of labels including Vee-Jay, Riverside and Epic, signed with Stax Records in Memphis.  Though their first two Stax albums, Soul Folk in Action and We'll Get Over, were produced by Booker T & The MG's guitarist Steve Cropper (a staff producer at the label), by the time it came to make Be Altitude: Respect Yourself, label co-owner Al Bell had begun taking a decisive production hand.  

Bell encouraged the group to move in a more pop/soul direction while sending them to record with the famed house band at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, and also composed the album's hit song, the gospel plea "I'll Take You There," (#1 on both pop and R&B charts) which became the highest charting single of the Staples' career.  Mavis Staples, one of soul music's greatest vocalists, works through the lyrics, shouting, testifying, and even scatting over the tune's imploring appeal.  The lyrics of the other hit single, "Respect Yourself," not only encapsulate much of the Staples famous positivity—"Keep talkin' bout the president, won't stop air pollution/ Put your hand on your mouth when you cough, that'll help the solution,"—but the chorus comes as close as Pops and his family ever came to uttering a profanity: "If you don't respect yourself/ Ain't nobody gonna give a good cahoot, na na na na." 

In the deep soul ballad "Name the Missing Word," Mavis condemns the sin of male pride, warning, "You go around thinkin' that you know it all/ Filthy man's gonna be your downfall." The band's breathtaking expertise at creating easy, organic grooves drives "We The People"; Mavis adds her soulful phrasing to a fashion warning from that time, "Hot pants in style, don't let our world go wild/ Mama's youngest child is learning fast." Conscious of retaining their longtime fans, the group returns to R&B-influenced gospel in "Who Do You Think You Are? (Jesus Christ the Super Star)" and "I'm Just Another Soldier," the latter of which begins with the opening bars of "Reveille" played on organ.  The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, nicknamed The Swampers, were able to conjure moods and grooves that artists like Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Paul Simon, came to north Alabama to get on their albums.  

Bell and Terry Manning, who supervised overdubs and mixing, produced a forceful but rich, multi-dimensional mix that displayed the groups' varied vocal talents in the best light. The horn section on these sessions, the South Memphis Horns, was led by ex-Bar-Kay trumpeter Ben Cauley, the only survivor of the 1967 plane crash that killed Otis Redding. The cherry on top was the talent of the great Eddie Hinton, whose lead guitar lines and accents, many subtle and mixed in the background, added essential textures. While the Staples would move on from Stax to Curtis Mayfield's Curtom Records and finally Warner Brothers, Be Altitude: Respect Yourself, is their masterpiece, a near perfect blend of religious belief and affirming messaging set in accessible soul pop music making it one of the classic albums of 1972.  © Robert Baird/Qobuz