Be What You Are by Staple Singers

Be What You Are, the Staple Singers' September 1973 record for Stax, keeps the family's gospel fire burning under a slick, strutting soul groove. Pops Staples, who built the group around his children, stands with daughters Mavis, Cleotha and Yvonne, Yvonne having stepped in again for her brother Pervis in 1970, and Mavis' voice does what it always does: turns a sermon into a party and back again.

The title track stumbled as the first single, but "If You're Ready (Come Go with Me)" made up for it in a hurry, going top ten on the Billboard Hot 100 and all the way to number one on the R&B chart, and "Touch a Hand, Make a Friend" kept the run going into 1974. The oddest credit comes at the very end: Jimmy Page plays acoustic and electric guitar, solo included, on the closing "Heaven", a link that ran through Stax engineer Terry Manning, a friend of Page's who had worked on Led Zeppelin III.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.