Mavis Staples & Levon Helm - Carry Me Home

 

Limited edition white vinyl double LP

Live album documents the final full joint concert from the legendary singer and and drummer

When Mavis Staples thinks about her late friend Levon Helm, memories of her family flood into her mind. But these days, Staples' strongest memory of her dear friend Helm is from the last time the two ever performed together. Back in June of 2011, Mavis Staples and her band arrived at Helm's Woodstock home for a very special edition of Helm's regular Midnight Ramble concerts, the series of shows Helm began holding at his barn-turned-performance-space in 2004. The two friends spent five or so days together, goofing around, rehashing old memories, and putting together the freewheeling set list for their Saturday night concert.

Eleven years later, and almost a decade after Helm's death in 2012, that show is finally being released as a live album, Carry Me Home — which marks the last-ever recording of a full set from the two musical legends.

"This was his dream, to have Mavis come to the barn," says the drummer's daughter, Amy. "It was her and Ralph Stanley. He said, ‘If I could just have those two perform ...' then his vision of (the Midnight Ramble) was complete. He'd been dreaming and envisioning her singing in that room since the day he started building it."

From the moment Staples arrived, the weekend felt like a family reunion. She tells Rolling Stone she still remembers greeting Helm on his porch in the middle of a rainstorm and the two old friends breaking into the spiritual "Didn't It Rain."

"I've never been so happy to see someone," says Staples, who bursts into laughter when remembering Helm messing around on his grandson's miniature drum kit at one point that weekend. During their time together, she says, "Levon was so happy. He was smiling every day and so healthy and he would walk in each morning with a fresh, beautiful shirt on, sticking his chest out. I said, ‘Levon, you look so good.' He would say, ‘Oh, Mavis, thank you.'"

Carry Me Home strays from both Staples and Helm's typical set lists of the time, comprising a number of old standards, covers, and originals that the two spontaneously worked up that weekend. Staples sings lead vocals throughout, covering the Impressions' "This Is My Country," which the Staple Singers had attempted to record decades earlier; Pops Staples' "Move Along Train," which Helm had covered two years earlier, on 2009's Electric Dirt; the gospel standard "Farther Along"; Nina Simone's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free," a song Staples had never sung before; and, of course, "The Weight," a song Staples and Helm immortalized in Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz — and during which Helm, 35 years after the film and barely singing at that point in his life, contributes a verse.

Thinking back on the performance now, Amy Helm realizes that it marked not only the last time her father ever performed with Staples, but really one of the last-ever documents of her father taking the stage while he was still feeling healthy and vital.

"He was really feeling good and strong and I remember he started to get sick again by the end of August," says Helm, who, like Staples, carries on her family's musical legacy in her solo career. "That summer, and this gig, was a really special, healthy, beautiful time, with lots of laughter. It's perfect for (one of his) last musical experiences like that to have been with her."

 

 

 

Side A

1. This Is My Country

2. Trouble in My Mind

3. Farther Along

Side B

1. Hand Writing on the Wall

2. I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free

3. Move Along Train

Side C

1. This May Be the Last Time

2. When I Go Away

3. Wide River to Cross

Side D

1. You Got to Move

2. You Got to Serve Somebody

3. The Weight

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