Music and civil rights icon Mavis Staples still singing for joy and justice

Though she’s a significant figure in music history and in the history of the civil rights movement, legendary soul singer Mavis Staples is also very much a contemporary artist.

Staples will stop in Olympia Saturday as part of a tour supporting “We Get By,” her latest album, made with singer/songwriter Ben Harper.

At 80, she’s smooth-skinned and vibrant, her raspy, rough-edged voice still strong. Though she’s been inducted into the Blues and Rock and Roll halls of fame, she’s as active as ever.

“When I was a kid, 80 was old, but I don’t feel old,” she told Rolling Stone’s Andy Green in an interview last year. “I’m not as sharp as I used to be when I’m talking, but I feel like I’m ready for another 10 years.”

Staples has been making music for nearly 70 years, beginning with her family’s band, The Staple Singers, and has been part of the civil rights struggles for nearly that long. The Staple Singers often performed before Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches.

She performed at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and sang in the White House for Barack Obama.

Her musical collaborators over the years have been nearly as well known.

She’s performed and recorded with The Band, Prince and Arcade Fire. Neko Case and Nick Cave have written songs for her. She’s toured with Bonnie Raitt.

She opened for Bob Dylan — and kissed him, too. He proposed to her in the early ’60s, but she said no, believing that she was too young for marriage.

“We were really in love,” she told music critic Greg Kot in an interview for the 2014 biography “I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers and the March Up Freedom’s Highway.” “It was my first love, and it was the one I lost.”

What’s she never lost is her passion for social justice. These days, she’s still singing the songs of the civil rights era and new ones along the same lines.

“Say it loud say it clear/Gotta change around here,” she sings on “Change,” the first track on “We Get By.”

It’s something that’s needed now, she says, as much as ever.

“I’m the messenger,” she said in her bio. “That’s my job — it has been for my whole life — and I can’t just give up while the struggle’s still alive.”

She also can’t give up touring.

“Once I go home from the road, I’m ready to go again,” she told The Guardian’s Jude Rogers in a 2016 interview. “It’s all I’ve done all my life.”

And she’s about joy as much as justice.

“I sing because I want to leave people feeling better than I found them,” she said in her online bio. “I want them to walk away with a positive message in their hearts, feeling stronger than they felt before. I’m singing to myself for those same reasons, too.”

Mavis Staples

• What: Soul singer Staples, still full of life at 80, stops in Olympia.
• When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 11
• Where: The Washington Center for the Performing Arts, 512 Washington St. SE, Olympia
• Tickets: $25-$79
• More information: washingtoncenter.org, 360-753-8586
• Hear Staples and Ben Harper sing “We Get By” at https://youtu.be/Z4Ks9w3PNxM.