Be Altitude: Respect Yourself (Reissue)

From the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, the Stax label dominated soul, R&B, gospel, and related genres with a stable of artists who have since become iconic figures in the history of American popular music. Stax Remasters is a series of reissues that cast a new light on classic Stax recordings with the help of 24-bit remastering, rare bonus tracks, and new liner notes to frame the recordings in a historical context.

Originally released in 1972, Be Altitude: Respect Yourself captures the celebrated family vocal group in what was essentially the third act of their career, according to music historian Rob Bowman. The Staple Singers had initially established themselves as a gospel group in the 1950s, and then merged with the folk music closely tied to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and ultimately veered away from protest songs and toward what Mavis Staples termed "message music" in the early and mid-1970s.

Be Altitude found a comfortable middle ground between gospel music and secular music. The two previously unreleased bonus tracks - "Walking in Water Over Our Head" and an alternate version of "Heavy Makes You Happy" - were both recorded at the Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama in 1970 and 1972, respectively.