The Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts announced that Milmon Harrison, associate professor in the African American and African Studies Program, will be a panelist with soul and gospel singing legend Mavis Staples at a Jan. 14 forum: "Civil Rights: The Music and the Movement."
The 5 p.m. forum in the center's Studio Theatre is free and open to the public. The center previously announced a different faculty participant.
At 8 p.m. the same day, Staples is scheduled to appear on the center's Jackson Hall stage in a concert titled "We'll Never Turn Back." The Mondavi Center is presenting the concert in honor of the late Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader whose birthday is Jan. 15. He would be 80.
Staples was a preteen in her native Chicago in 1950 when she started performing with her family at local churches and then on a weekly radio show. In 1957, after Mavis graduated from high school, the family took its show on the road. Roebuck “Pops” Staples sang and played guitar, his children sang—and they became known as “God’s Greatest Hitmakers.”
By the mid-1960s, inspired by Pops’ close friendship with Rev. King, the Staple Singers had become the spiritual and musical voices of the civil rights movement, according to Mavis Staples’ Web site.
She calls her Mondavi Center concert “We’ll Never Turn Back,” taken from her 2007 album of the same name. Among this collection of songs of racial struggle of the 1950s and ’60s, one of the most moving is “My Own Eyes”—about a night that Staples spent in jail “at the behest of a racist cop” in West Memphis, Ark., according to Amazon.com.
The album also includes “Eyes on the Prize,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Down in Mississippi” and “On My Way.”
AT A GLANCE
WHAT: Forum@MC, “Civil Rights: The Music and the Movement,” with Mavis Staples and Milmon Harrison, associate professor in the African American and African Studies Program. Organizers said Jeffrey Callison of Sacramento radio station KXJZ's Insight program will be the forum host.
WHEN: 5 p.m. Jan. 14, Studio Theatre, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts
ADMISSION: Free
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WHAT: “We’ll Never Turn Back,” concert by Mavis Staples
WHEN: 8 p.m. Jan. 14
WHERE: Jackson Hall, Mondavi Center
ALSO: Preperformance lecture by Jon Fox, bluegrass writer and historian, 7 p.m., Studio Theatre
TICKETS: (530) 754-2787 or (866) 754-2787, or
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Media Resources
Dave Jones, Dateline, 530-752-6556, dljones@ucdavis.edu