FEATURE: Spotlight: Annie & The Caldwells

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Carl Martin

 

Annie & The Caldwells

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I am glad that…

Annie & The Caldwells are coming to the U.K. later this month. The American group released their exceptional album, Can’t Lose My (Soul) earlier this year. A six-track work of wonder from the family band. Before I get to interviews with the group and a review for Can’t Lose My (Soul), I want to highlight their biography from their official website:

“Annie Caldwells says, “My family is my band,” and so naturally the history of the band—and their music—dovetails with the family’s real life. ANNIE & THE CALDWELLS are a family that plays a powerful disco soul from West Point, Mississippi. When Annie was 16 years old, in Aberdeen, Mississippi, she played in a band with her brothers (they were called the Staples Jr. Singers, a group of teenagers with a single album recorded in the 1970s). One day, the Staples Jrs. were singing on a church program in West Point, when a guitarist who played with one of Annie’s brothers in another band heard her and said, “Who — is that?” That moment Annie met Willie Joe Caldwell, Sr., her husband of the last fifty years, and the co-founder and guitarist for the Caldwells who supports his family’s high-flying vocals with fuzzy, psychedelic riffs.

Annie and Joe got married so young that their parents had to sign for them. They started their own family, and Annie opened a store on Main Street in West Point called Caldwell Fashions—which has been a beloved staple for women dressing for COGIC (Church Of God In Christ) convocations and church anniversaries since the ’80s. Things changed for the Caldwells when their eldest daughter was old enough to be invited to sing at a high school talent show. The Caldwells were shocked that their daughter was singing the blues—“the blues!” for Annie, means any music of any genre that doesn’t speak the gospel.

“We thought, if we don’t do something, the devil’s going to get her,” Annie said. “We decided we better get these children because people wanted them to sing in places where they played the blues, and I didn’t want that.”

So Annie and Joe started their own group, which pulled from the music their kids loved — The Gap Band, Chaka Kahn, Bootsy Collins. “We started singing ‘Is My Living in Vain’ by the Clark Sisters,” Annie said, illustrating how the group infuses gospel with grit and street savvy. Two decades later, the constellation of family members in The Caldwells is more or less the same: Annie is backed by their daughters Deborah Caldwell Moore and Anjessica Caldwell and goddaughter Toni Rivers; their eldest son Willie Jr. is on the bass and youngest son Abel Aquirius is on the drums. Their real troubles and experiences—as an intergenerational family run by women—are at the center of their music: Memories of a daughter’s birth or a brother’s recovery from an illness spill into transcendent moments onstage.

“I feel like the message is often for me first,” Annie said about the songs she writes. “But so many ladies come up crying and say, ‘I feel like what you were saying was for me.’”

“What does it mean to seek God as a woman?” Danielle Amir Jackson, who wrote the liner notes for Annie & The Caldwells’ new record Can’t Lose My (Soul) (out via Luaka Bop on March 21), asked Annie’s daughter Deborah this potent question after listening to her song, “Wrong.” Deborah is a hairstylist in West Point—she styles the group's hair in jazzy side swoops before their shows. Between Deborah’s work and Annie’s styling of the girls in royal blues and purples, gabardine fabric and peplum accented by gold jewelry and bright-red nails, the Caldwell sound is married to a vision of opulent feminine power, unflinching, honest witness, and devotion.

She wrote “Wrong” as a testimony after a tumultuous period in her marriage to her beloved late husband. Reeling from a betrayal, Deborah believed that getting revenge on her husband might improve the balance of tensions between them — but getting revenge only left her feeling depleted.“Being a married woman / experiencing heartache and pain,” Deborah sings in a performance that is raw and direct.  “Girls, I was wrong.”  The song is a confession, and just as it happened in real life, her family’s voices answer her call: “Wrong! Wrong!,” her mother and sister sing behind her. That’s the family dynamic at work.

“I sing about my life. I don’t just sing to be singing,” Deborah said. “A lot of women liked it and a lot of men didn’t like it. The women can relate. But we wouldn’t be in this position if men didn’t put us in this position.”

Can't Lose My (Soul), is twenty years in the making. They recorded it in West Point down the street from Annie and Joe’s house—at a church where Joe plays guitar every other Sunday, and where his father used to be a deacon. It was produced by Ahmed Gallab, the artist Sinkane, who together with the engineer Albert DiFiore drove a mobile rig down from Nashville and turned the back room of the church into a control room.

As a producer, Gallab saw his role there as making sure that “each song felt as powerful, as raw, and as genuine as the family dynamic behind it. The goal was always to stay true to the feeling behind the music,” which is why “everything was tracked live, in their church, together as a family.”

From a practical level, a big part of Gallab’s job was to get out of the way. When the band was in a groove, he would stick his head out of the control room and frantically swing his arm around like a pinwheel and stage whisper, “Keep going!” and “More! more! more!”

“Hearing Annie’s voice for the first time was like witnessing something rare,” Gallab said of the recording session, “Like you’re in the presence of a force of nature that’s been here long before you. It’s visceral, almost like it’s coming from her soul. You can feel every part of her life, every little piece of her journey, in each note she hits. It’s pure talent: no effort, no pretense, just real and raw.”

“And working with Deborah was like tapping into pure fire,” he said. “She's feisty, no doubt! That spark, that intensity she brings, spills right into her music. The tough love that these girls gave each other. Calling each other out when one wasn’t in key. It was pretty funny.”

In November 2024, ANNIE & THE CALDWELLS travelled to Utrecht in the Netherlands to perform at the prestigious Le Guess Who? Festival, where MOJO caught their showstopping performance and reviewed it as, “The most exciting, most dynamic family of faith imaginable: their rhythm section (dad and two sons) would give the Family Stone a run for its money; the front line (mum and daughters) have unquenchable sass and spirituality, and the crowd doesn’t need persuading to crash the stage and be saved by songs. It feels like 2025 may already be their year.” Amen to that!”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Eric Welles Nystrom

I love Annie and the Caldwells is this family group that spans generations. I can’t think of any other that does this. Annie Caldwell (vocals), her husband Willie Joe Caldwell Sr. (guitar), their daughters Deborah Caldwell Moore and Anjessica Caldwell (vocals), and their sons Willie Jr. (bass) and Abel Aquirius (drums). The band also includes their goddaughter, Toni Rivers (vocals). It is a wonderful blend of ages and dynamics. You can feel the harmony and closeness in the music. How there is this obvious connection and chemistry. I want to head back to an interview from The Guardian from Boxing Day last year. I only discovered Annie & The Caldwells earlier this year. It has been amazing learning more about them. A phenomenal group that are “now sending audiences into ecstasy with disco-tinged soul gospel”, make sure that they are on your radar:

“Annie and the Caldwells’ appearance looks extraordinary: a mother and her three middle-aged daughters, clad in matching multicoloured harlequin-print dresses, belting out raw, disco-tinged soul gospel in the midst of a delirious stage invasion by ecstatic, dancing punters.

“It was just beautiful,” says Annie Caldwell down the phone from her home in West Point, Mississippi. “The lord, you know, he’s not just in the church buildings, he’s going to highways and byways – wherever he sends us, we’re willing to go, because a lot of people aren’t going to come to church. I heard people say that they felt something they never felt before, and that makes them believe more in what we believe in, and that is lord God almighty.”

Eagle-eyed viewers with an interest in obscure gospel might recognise Annie Caldwell from the Staples Jr Singers, the band she formed with her brothers in the 70s, whose solitary 1975 album When Do We Get Paid was rescued from obscurity and reissued to wild acclaim in 2022. Annie and the Caldwells are the band she subsequently formed in the 1980s with her guitarist husband, Willie, after hearing their daughters rehearsing for a talent show: they were singing secular material, which she didn’t like the sound of. “I said: let me get those girls before the devil gets them!”

With the band rounded out by their sons on bass and drums and Caldwell, a dress shop owner by day, in charge of the band’s wardrobe (which she accurately describes as “jazzy”), they spent decades performing in churches around Mississippi and occasionally recording demos, a few collections of which are on Spotify. Then David Byrne’s label Luaka Bop – which had reissued the Staples Jr Singers album – suggested they make an album proper. “We recorded it in a little church on the corner of the street from where I live,” Caldwell says. “There was so much power and spirit within that place, and I thank God for that – he really came in and started blessing us.”

It is a fantastic album – funky, gritty and powerful, packed with incredible singing and potent songs that cast a stark eye over life’s hardships. Nevertheless, it must be odd, releasing a debut album 40 years after you start performing. But Caldwell seems unfazed. “Ever since I was young, God let me know that this was going to happen,” she says. “I have to give him praise and thank him that he remembered me after all these years”.

It is clear that music is family for Annie & The Caldwells. I want to move to an interview from Bandcamp from earlier in the year. There is this fascinating backstory when we look at this group. I have not included all of the interview and edited it down, though I wanted to include as much as possible. Anyone who has not heard Can’t Lose My (Soul) needs to listen to it right now. I am glad that they have support in the U.K. and have gigs here. I do hope that their music gets shared and there is more backing and airplay, as they deserve to be huge:

“Annie was raised by a mother who was also a head. Annie’s parents “got saved” when she was nine years old, back when she was just Annie Brown from Aberdeen, Mississippi. They joined the Church of God, a Pentecostal denomination, where her father became a deacon and her mother a minister at a time when very few Black churches in the South allowed women to wear the cloth. Even though the Brown’s church was among the more progressive in the community, her mother never got the opportunity to lead her own congregation. Instead, she ministered at several local churches and took her family on the regional gospel circuit. It was on those tours that Annie and her siblings began singing and playing music. “I never went to music class in school, “ she says. “My momma and my daddy was in the church. I thank God that I heard a lot of great singing when I was coming up. I relate myself to some of their songs, because the music was so sweet—Mavis [Staples] singing songs like ‘Somebody Save Me.’ Those songs stick with me today.”

As their popularity grew, the siblings took up the name the Staples Jr. Singers, inspired by their frequent comparisons to the American gospel and R&B group The Staple Singers. When Annie was only 13, the Staples Jr. Singers (with her brothers A.R.C., Bobby, Cleveland, and Edward) self-funded their 1975 album When Do We Get Paid. The group managed to sell a few hundred copies—mostly on the front lawn outside their house. That record found its way into crate-digging infamy, with original copies fetching up to $700 on Discogs. In 2022, Luaka Bop reissued When Do We Get Paid and requested a follow-up, which became 2024’s Searching.

But that’s only half of Annie’s story.

When Annie was in high school, the family band dropped the Staples name, performing instead as the Browns. After a performance at a church in West Point, Mississippi, roughly 20 miles south of Aberdeen, a young man named Willie Caldwell approached Annie’s youngest brother Ronnel to ask about the girl in the band with that special voice. Caldwell had a family band background of his own as a guitar player and singer in a church group with his brothers. Before long, he and Annie were married. Caldwell asked for Annie to move to West Point with him, a decision that weighed heavily on her. “I didn’t wanna leave my brothers,” she says. “I didn’t wanna tell them that I was leaving to make my own family. We had a lot of fun. We did a lot of things that was joyful. The good days outweigh the bad ones.”

Annie and Willie started a family right away, naming their firstborn Willie Caldwell Jr. The Caldwells eventually had a total of five children. The boys Willie Jr. and Abel both learned to play from their father. Annie says that Junior was five when he “started pecking at the drums” at rehearsals and at church. By age seven, he was playing alongside his father, while Annie and her daughters Anora and Deborah sang. When Abel was old enough to play drums, Willie Sr. taught Junior to play bass. A family band was taking shape. “Music really comes from both sides of the family,” Annie says. “I guess that’s why it is what it is now.”

Just like their mother, Annie’s daughters sang in talent shows. But when Annie and Willie Sr. saw their daughter Deborah drifting toward secular music, they got serious about making Annie & the Caldwells a real band. Rather than forbidding secular music outright, the group instead adjusted the message of songs by Bootsy Collins, Rufus & Chaka Khan, and the Gap Band to reflect their own beliefs. So Bootsy’s “I’d Rather Be With You” became a message of devotion to a Higher Power by including an “Oh, Lord” between repeats of the refrain. Then, Bootsy gives way to Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody,” changing the lyrics to declare, “Ain’t nobody…love me like Jesus.”

Following in the footsteps of her mother, Annie took her family band on the road, providing custom stage attire for her daughters. Annie & The Caldwells recorded two albums for the Memphis blues and soul label Ecko Records, 2013’s Answer Me and 2018’s We Made It. As Deborah Caldwell Moore grew into her role in the band, she began writing originals. Complications in her marriage inspired an R&B slow jam called “Rough Spot.” That personal perspective on heartache and forgiveness was further explored on “Wrong,” the lead single for the group’s Luaka Bop debut. “I thank God that they was into the music, just like we was,” Annie says. “A lot of times children go another way. They see the parents doing something and don’t want much to do with that.”

Annie’s youngest daughter Anjessica was once that type of child. She says she resisted joining her siblings in the band until she was 15. She loved music, but wanted a life outside the family tradition. It took her older sister Deborah, who works in a hair salon and styles all the sisters, to offer an ultimatum: “Sing, or you can’t get your hair did.” Anjessica chose singing. “I’m stuck like tuck now,” she says, admitting that her love for the band continues to grow.

The Caldwell Singers have been together for over 30 years now. Annie says they never limited their performances to strictly Pentecostal churches—she’s always willing to take their act wherever they’re welcomed. “God don’t have no denomination,” she says. That same belief encouraged them to sign with Luaka Bop and record their new album with Ahmed Abdullahi Gallab, aka Sinkane.

Annie always trusted that God had a plan for the Caldwells. For her, the support from Luaka Bop for both the Staples Jr. Singers and The Caldwells is a blessing that has allowed the families to take their message to overseas festivals. But no matter where the success takes them from here, the lineage of musicians within the Browns and Caldwell families remains strong. The sons and grandchildren of Edward and R.C. Brown played on Searching, while Annie’s goddaughter Toni Arlanza Rivers and Deborah’s daughter Hikemia Moore sang backup on the Caldwells record. When asked if there’s a next generation of Caldwells interested in singing, the proud grandmother in Annie shares that her granddaughter called her after getting a microphone for Christmas to sing “Dear Lord (You’ve Been Good To Me)”.

Prior to getting to a review, I want to finish up by sourcing from this interview from Woman & Home. Annie Caldwell remarks how it has been an astonishing year and the group have had so many adventures. They have a big fan in Elton John. He admired their debut album and advised people to go and buy it. You do not have to be a fan of Gospel or be familiar with the music they play. It is joyous and mesmerising and crosses all musical barriers. It is an album that everyone needs to hear:

“The family recorded their album, Can’t Lose My (Soul) all live in their local church and the uplifting tunes, based on personal experience, have been likened to the slinky grooves of Gloria Gaynor and the funk of James Brown.

“It can get emotional as we sing about what we’ve been through, but the energy when we perform together is powerful and we all build off what each other’s doing. It’s just been such a privilege and a blessing to have been given this opportunity,” she says.

“I’d never been on a plane before until last year and now we’ve played in festivals in Australia, Spain, Holland and the UK. Every performance ends up being my favourite as I love seeing the crowds dancing and getting such energy from our music. I always want to go immediately back to the stage and do it all over again.”

When she’s not performing, Annie still runs Caldwell’s Fashions, a dress shop in West Point, Mississippi, so she and her daughters had a lot of fun designing the outfits for the tour with matching multi-colored harlequin print dresses that set the tone for their energetic performances.

Luckily, Annie’s granddaughter, Hikemia, was on hand to run the shop while the band was touring in Europe.

“I still fuss over all my family, even though most of them are all grown up now, but we love being together on tour,” she explains. “I have nine grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, so there wasn’t room for them to join us, but I loved FaceTiming them from all over, telling them about our adventures.

"They just wanted to know when we were all coming home!”

PHOTO CREDIT: Adam Wissing

The album has been an out-and-out success, receiving great reviews in The Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The Boston Globe and MOJO Magazine, not to mention from some famous faces in the music industry, including Candi Staton and Sir Elton John.

“It was incredible when Elton said he thought our album was a great record and told people to go out and buy it,” Annie recalls. “It goes to show you never know who’s hearing your music until they come out and say it.

“We also get messages from so many people through Instagram and Facebook who are fans and say they find our lyrics and music relatable and inspiring. All that positive feedback gives me huge energy to go on and make more music.”

With such success already under their belts, the next 12 months are going to be equally action-packed for The Caldwell family with the release of their new album and more performances around the world.

“I used to get nervous performing, but that feeling left a long time ago. Now there's simply joy from getting out on stage together as a family. We get along so well and there’s a lot of laughter,” Annie says.

“We’re off to Japan, Brazil and Europe again soon, which has me so excited. It’s an absolute whirlwind but I feel so blessed that we’ve been given this chance and we’re making the most of every moment.

“Ever since I was young, I felt that God let me know that this was going to happen one day. I'm just thankful that He remembered me after all these years”.

I am going to return to The Guardian and their five-star review for Can’t Lose My (Soul). Lauding the extraordinary harmonies and the fact that this album lifts you from despair and is life-affirming. The group are playing huge festivals and getting all this plaudits. It might be strange for them but, if they did not have the talent to back it up, then they might otherwise have been overlooked. As it is, they are this insanely talented group that are rightly getting rewards and celebration. Let’s hope that it continues for years more:

“The vocals are raw but perfectly pitched; there’s a kind of telepathic interplay between Annie Caldwell’s lead and the harmonies of her daughters during the improvised sections of the lengthy title track and Don’t You Hear Me Calling. So is the band, who somehow contrive to sound both extremely tight and yet spontaneous: if, as Deborah Caldwell has claimed, the band “don’t practise”, then their performances here are an advert for the honing effect of playing in church every other Sunday.

They’re also musically diverse. For all Annie Caldwell claims to have co-opted her daughters into the band after hearing them singing blues – “I said: let me get those girls before the devil gets them,” she told me last year – there’s a distinct blues undertow to the title track. Dear Lord deals in tough funk, equipped with a liquid bassline that Bootsy Collins would have been proud of. I’m Going to Rise bears the influence of southern soul, the emotional edginess of the vocals cushioned by the wah-wah lushness of the music. Their uptempo tracks, meanwhile, sit in the vicinity of disco: you can detect something of Chaka Khan’s late 70s solo albums about I Made It and Wrong, the latter track momentarily shifting its gaze from the heavens to infidelity – albeit laying the blame at Satan’s door – to the accompaniment of a fabulous cyclical guitar lick that’s begging to be sampled (disco legend and sometime house producer Nicky Siano has already remixed it).

These are great, powerful, moving songs, made all the more potent by the fact that they’re recorded live, without an audience, in a church in the band’s hometown of West Point, Mississippi. The plain production makes Can’t Lose My (Soul) feel as if it’s happening before your eyes, adding a vividness and urgency, particularly in extempore moments. Mercifully, it steers clear of the kind of faux-antiquing that’s often applied to 21st-century soul music rooted in the past, as if trying to convince you that you’re listening to a long-lost album.

The lyrics steer clear of the hellfire and brimstone sermonising to which southern gospel can be prone: they never stint on describing hard times – bereavement, grief, a miraculous escape from a house fire (“God spoke to death, he told death: behave!”) – but their message is ultimately one of hope. You don’t need to share the Caldwells’ faith to find something powerful and inspiring in that, particularly given the current climate, which can easily incline you towards hopelessness; something steeped in tradition seems apropos right now. You should listen to Can’t Lose My (Soul) purely on musical terms. Moreover, it’s an album you might need”.

You might not have heard of Annie & The Caldwells. That is fine. However, I would urge you to listen to Can’t Lose My (Soul). Not only one of the absolute best debut albums from this year, it is up there with anything else released. Maybe it has flown under the radar of some websites, though I have seen other reviews and they are all ecstatic. There is no doubting the credentials and quality of the album and Annie & The Caldwells. If you let this group pass you by, then you will…

LOSE out on something incredible.

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Sam Liddicott