Album Review: Can't Lose My (Soul) by Annie And The Caldwells

Three generations produce fully lived-in, authentic music with natural soul When Sly Stone sang the words, "It's a family affair" in 1971, it is so tempting to think he could have been referring to Annie & The Caldwells. Here is a band who have come out of nowhere, propelled into the limelight by David Byrne on his Luaka Bop label. And yet they have always been there, at West Point, Mississippi, just waiting to be discovered.

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Annie & the Caldwells’ Can’t Lose My (Soul) emerges victorious--against all odds--from the dense overgrowth of history’s enigmatic wilderness. Our journey begins in the early 1970s, when gospel’s DNA, which had already shaped funk and R&B, cross-pollinated back, inspiring a new generation of gospel singers to embrace the same unapologetic, dance-worthy grooves that fueled the Staples Singers--whose gospel-funk hybrid could make you shut up, get down, and maybe even get a little spiritually minded. Among the Staples’s disciples was a teenage group of siblings from Aberdeen, Mississippi, who called themselves the Staples Jr.

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