This little light: Mavis Staples in Savannah on Saturday

CHICAGO -- Mavis Staples was at a session in Los Angeles with the Freedom Singers last year recording her extraordinary new album, "We'll Never Turn Back." The air-conditioned studio seemed far removed from the world Staples and the Freedom Singers -- Rutha Harris, Charles Neblett and Bettie-Mae Fikes -- had known in the early '60s, she says.

Those were the bad old days, when restaurants, hotels, bathrooms and even drinking fountains were divided by race in the segregationist South, when African-Americans marched for basic freedoms and were assaulted with police clubs, water cannons and attack dogs. Mavis Staples says she and her family, the Staple Singers, were on the front lines back then, along with the Freedom Singers. These vocal groups provided the soundtrack to that era, with their songs of perseverance and hope in the face of debilitating odds. Not for nothing were the Staples the favorite group of Martin Luther King Jr.

Fast forward to the present and Mavis Staples was at Sound City Studio in Van Nuys, Calif., with producer Ry Cooder and the Freedom Singers, intent not so much on revisiting that era as channeling it.

Their reunion was orchestrated by Andy Kaulkin, president of Staples' label, Anti Records. He had read U.S. Rep. John Lewis' (D-Ala.) civil rights memoir "Walking With the Wind," and approached Staples about making an album that would update and recontextualize songs from that era.

Staples mentally scans the headlines from recent times: A young black man shot dozens of times by police on his wedding day; comedian Michael Richards spewing racist invective on a widely seen Internet video clip. Though the civil rights era may have ended, the need for songs that address the racial divide in America felt more urgent than ever.

Kaulkin next called in Cooder to produce the album. The multi-instrumentalist, who oversaw the Buena Vista Social Club sessions in Havana in the mid-'90s, is choosy about his recording projects. But he jumped at the opportunity to work with one of the original Staple Singers.

"When I first heard the Staple Singers' (1950s gospel hit) 'Uncloudy Day,' it stopped me in my tracks," says Cooder, 60. "Then I saw them live (in the early '60s). They made me feel like a hopeless, ignorant white kid from Santa Monica without a prayer. There was obviously a world out there, parallel to mine, that was completely unknown to me."

Cooder caught up fast, emulating the spidery, atmospheric guitar-playing of the group's patriarch, Pops Staples, and later working with Pops on a pair of '90s albums. When Cooder arrived at Mavis Staples' South Side condominium last year to discuss the new album, he immediately asked for her late father's amplifier and plugged in his guitar as he and Mavis began working on songs.

It would set the tone for their collaboration. After meeting King in the '60s, Pops steered the Staple Singers toward freedom and message songs. And though he died in 2000, his presence loomed large over the "We'll Never Turn Back" sessions.

It's flat-out one of the best collections of songs Staples has ever made, a small-combo gospel album that rocks and rolls. At 67, she sounds more fiery and inspired than ever. Many of the songs were tracked in only one or two takes, so that "We'll Never Turn Back" essentially documents excellent musicians and singers reacting and responding to one another in real time: Cooder on guitar and mandolin, the peerless Jim Keltner on drums, Mike Elizondo on bass, the call-and-response harmonies of the Freedom Singers and South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, featured on three songs.