Annie Caldwells says, “My family is my band,” and so naturally the history of the band—and their music—dovetails with the family’s real life. ANNIE & THE CALDWELLS are a family that plays a powerful disco soul from West Point, Mississippi. When Annie was 16 years old, in Aberdeen, Mississippi, she played in a band with her brothers (they were called the Staples Jr. Singers, a group of teenagers with a single album recorded in the 1970s). One day, the Staples Jrs. were singing on a church program in West Point, when a guitarist who played with one of Annie’s brothers in another band heard her and said, “Who — is that?” That moment Annie met Willie Joe Caldwell, Sr., her husband of the last fifty years, and the co-founder and guitarist for the Caldwells who supports his family’s high-flying vocals with fuzzy, psychedelic riffs.
