Growing up, Annie Brown Caldwell was often asked why she wasn’t singing lead more often on songs by her family’s group, Staples Jr. Singers. Her vocal power was never in doubt: Her brothers could belt with soulful, raspy wails, but when Annie channeled Mavis Staples in their rendition of “Somebody Save Me,” she shook the rafters. Politely, Caldwell would respond to the question with, “In due time.”
That was Annie’s life in the 1970s. Now, with the 40 years-in-the-making release of her debut album as Annie & The Caldwells, she attributes her shift to center stage to Divine intervention. “The Lord showed me that he made me the head, not the tail,” she says.
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.”
As the family was growing in the 1980s, Annie proved she was more than a devoted, church-going mother—she was also a canny businesswoman. Annie opened Caldwell Fashions, a clothing store on Main Street in West Point, specializing specifically in women’s clothing for Church Of God In Christ convocations and anniversaries. When the small shop became successful, she purchased the larger retail space next door and expanded operations. Caldwell Fashions remains in that location to this day, with service hours adjusted to suit the band’s touring schedule. Appointments are encouraged.
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.
Rather than bring the Caldwells to a studio, Gallab put the family on their home turf at the Message Center in West Point, where they perform every other Sunday. The Caldwells only rehearse once a year, if at all. Anjessica says that recording in the Message Center put everyone at ease to be themselves, laugh, and explore ideas. The Caldwell’s “I Know We’ll Make It”—with its “you dropped the bomb on me” Gap Band interpolation—is an old staple in their repertoire. Reworked as “I Made It,” Gallab gives the track an upbeat disco pulse, with bongos built to propel the hippest Brooklyn dance floor. Annie takes the lead on “Don’t You Hear Me Calling,” a wailing testimonial about her dear brother Theodis who needed a heart transplant in the 1980s. Told through Annie’s eyes as she watches her mother seek the lord’s mercy on her knees in a hotel bathroom, the seven-minute epic moves through tragedy and redemption with a genuinely moving grace. For the Caldwells and Browns, it’s proof of miracles engineered by God as Theodis’s transfer to a Birmingham, Alabama hospital and mother Brown’s prayers led to a white family in Tennessee donating their young daughter’s heart after her untimely death in a car crash. The transplant gave Theodis, a married father with children, a few more years with his family before he eventually passed from heart complications.
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.
That was Annie’s life in the 1970s. Now, with the 40 years-in-the-making release of her debut album as Annie & The Caldwells, she attributes her shift to center stage to Divine intervention. “The Lord showed me that he made me the head, not the tail,” she says.
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.”
As the family was growing in the 1980s, Annie proved she was more than a devoted, church-going mother—she was also a canny businesswoman. Annie opened Caldwell Fashions, a clothing store on Main Street in West Point, specializing specifically in women’s clothing for Church Of God In Christ convocations and anniversaries. When the small shop became successful, she purchased the larger retail space next door and expanded operations. Caldwell Fashions remains in that location to this day, with service hours adjusted to suit the band’s touring schedule. Appointments are encouraged.
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.
Rather than bring the Caldwells to a studio, Gallab put the family on their home turf at the Message Center in West Point, where they perform every other Sunday. The Caldwells only rehearse once a year, if at all. Anjessica says that recording in the Message Center put everyone at ease to be themselves, laugh, and explore ideas. The Caldwell’s “I Know We’ll Make It”—with its “you dropped the bomb on me” Gap Band interpolation—is an old staple in their repertoire. Reworked as “I Made It,” Gallab gives the track an upbeat disco pulse, with bongos built to propel the hippest Brooklyn dance floor. Annie takes the lead on “Don’t You Hear Me Calling,” a wailing testimonial about her dear brother Theodis who needed a heart transplant in the 1980s. Told through Annie’s eyes as she watches her mother seek the lord’s mercy on her knees in a hotel bathroom, the seven-minute epic moves through tragedy and redemption with a genuinely moving grace. For the Caldwells and Browns, it’s proof of miracles engineered by God as Theodis’s transfer to a Birmingham, Alabama hospital and mother Brown’s prayers led to a white family in Tennessee donating their young daughter’s heart after her untimely death in a car crash. The transplant gave Theodis, a married father with children, a few more years with his family before he eventually passed from heart complications.
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.