Mavis Staples / We Get By / 2019
Change
urgent, mournful, defiant
Mavis Staples delivers a stark, chant-driven protest song built around a single insistent demand repeated until it becomes incantation. Written by Ben Harper for her 2019 album 'We Get By', it channels gun violence and the unfinished work of the civil rights movement into a plainspoken call-and-response that trades nuance for urgency.
gun violence unfinished freedom collective action protest as ritual moral urgency
Who's speaking
A communal first-person voice ('we') addressing an unnamed 'around here' -- a neighborhood, a nation, an audience -- speaking as both witness and exhorter rather than an individual narrator telling her own story.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story so much as escalate a demand. It opens with a bare assertion that change is necessary, then grounds that abstraction in a specific image of gun violence and grieving mothers, pivots to a philosophical question about what freedom actually means if people haven't internalized it, drops in a cryptic code-like phrase, and closes by dissolving back into pure repetition and invocation.
How it's built
The song is built almost entirely on refrain and variation rather than conventional verse-chorus contrast -- each section restates 'change' with a new piece of imagery or argument attached, so the structure mimics a rally or sermon building momentum through accumulation rather than narrative development. The bridge-like question about freedom functions as the song's intellectual hinge, and the final section strips back to call-and-response, letting the backing vocals answer the lead the way a congregation answers a preacher.
Section by section
Opening refrain
The song begins by simply stating its thesis without preamble -- no scene-setting, just the demand itself, repeated until it functions less as a sentence than as a drumbeat.i It establishes the chant structure that will carry the entire track.rbcommentary
Violence verse
“bullets flying, mothers crying”
This is the song's one moment of direct imagery, and it's deliberately spare -- two clauses, no elaboration -- functioning like a headline rather than a scene. It supplies the concrete grievance the abstract chant is responding to.
Freedom question
“what good is freedom”
The song turns inward here, suggesting that political or legal freedom means little without a corresponding internal or cultural transformation. It's the track's most argumentative moment, converting protest into self-examination aimed at the community as much as at oppressive systems.
Coded verse
The sudden shift into riddle-like, symbolic language breaks the song's plain diction and gives it a mysterious, almost mystical weight, evoking older traditions of coded communication within protest and spiritual music without spelling out a literal meaning.rc
Closing chant
The song dissolves back into pure call-and-response, with the backing vocals echoing the lead's demand. This stripped-down ending reinforces that the song's power lies less in explanation than in collective repetition -- change asserted as something achieved through communal insistence rather than individual reasoning.
Craft
- anaphora
- The insistent repetition of the demand for change across nearly every section creates a chant-like momentum that mimics protest chants and gospel call-and-response, reinforcing urgency through sheer accumulation rather than argument.
- rhetorical question
- The line interrogating what freedom is worth without having learned to be free converts the song from pure demand into self-critique, suggesting liberation is incomplete without internal transformation, not just changed laws.
- cryptic coding
- The list of letter, color, and number functions like a riddle or mnemonic, evoking old spiritual or coded-message traditions where seemingly arbitrary symbols carry hidden meaning, lending the song a ritualistic, almost incantatory texture distinct from its otherwise plain language.
- concrete imagery amid abstraction
- Against the song's mostly abstract chanting, the image of fingers on a trigger and mothers crying grounds the demand for change in specific, visceral stakes, keeping the repetition from floating into empty sloganeering.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a deliberately blunt protest chant in the Staples/gospel tradition, prioritizing communal urgency over lyrical complexity -- its repetitions are the point, meant to be sung along to and to build collective resolve rather than to convey a developed argument. An alternative reading could see the freedom question as the song's real center, with the chant structure serving as a frame for that one moment of genuine interrogation about whether external change without internal transformation is enough; under that reading the surrounding repetition is less filler than ritual preparation for that single turn.
Context
The song appears on Mavis Staples's 2019 album 'We Get By', written and produced by Ben Harper, released during a period of heightened public attention to gun violence and ongoing racial justice movements in the US. Staples has a long history of civil-rights-era music through the Staple Singers, and this track continues that lineage explicitly, though I don't have specific confirmed details about the writing or recording circumstances beyond the credited collaboration with Harper.
Listen for
- the shift in vocal texture between Staples's lead and the chanted backing responses
- the way the arrangement likely strips down or builds during the repeated refrains to mirror the lyric's escalation
- the tonal contrast between the blunt violence imagery and the more reflective freedom question
- the rhythmic, almost spoken-word cadence of the coded letter/color/number verse
About Mavis Staples
Mavis Staples is an American rhythm and blues and gospel singer and civil rights activist. Named one of the "Greatest Singers of all Time" by Rolling Stone, she rose to fame as a member of her family's band the Staple Singers, of which she is the last surviving member.
b. 1939 / United States
Full biography and catalogue