At first blush, Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy might not seem like musical kindred spirits: Staples is a revered gospel-soul singer who’s been performing for more than 60 years—most of them as the lead singer for the Staple Singers, who started out as a strictly-gospel ensemble, before making their crossover move to gospel-soul music in the 1970s.

In addition, she’s made about 10 solo records that have mostly plumbed the same gospel / trad-R&B terrain.

Tweedy, meanwhile, is the leader of Wilco, who began as an alt-country group in the mid-1990s before morphing into a more unpredictable / experimental modern-rock band in the ensuing years.

But Tweedy was actually a Staple Singers fan as a kid, when he worked in a Chicago record store, and has remained a fan of gospel and other roots styles even when Wilco was peeling the paint off the walls in the mid-to-late-'00s with some of their white-noise sonic bursts. So after seeing Staples perform in 2008, he approached her about producing her next album.

It was good timing for Staples, whose 2009 release, “We’ll Never Go Back” was a triumphant collection of trad-gospel material and other songs long associated with the 1960s civil rights movement. It got rave reviews, and was so definitive, Staples didn’t know what kind of record to do next.

So when she met with Tweedy, and he gave her his iPod and asked her to listen to the kind of songs he had in mind, she was surprised to hear that many of the tunes were old-time black gospel songs, some of them associated with the Staple Singers or earlier gospel groups like the Dixie Hummingbirds and Swan Silvertones.

A couple of them, “Creep Along Moses” and “Wonderful Savior” were trad-gospel standards, and two more, “Don’t Knock” and “Downward Road,” were written by Pops Staples—Mavis’s father and the patriarch of the Staple Singers, who also played guitar and lent his own sweet voice to the group’s vocal mix.

“When Jeff and I got together and he started playing me all these songs, I couldn't believe it,” said Staples, who comes to The Ark on Friday for the venue’s fall fundraiser. “He had all these old gospel songs, and I said, ‘Tweedy, where did you get these?’ These songs were a big part of my life and I felt like we were listening to the soundtrack of my life.” Indeed, Staples says she hadn’t heard some of them since she was a child.

“I think he just really understood where I was coming from and what I wanted to do,” said Staples in a recent e-mail interview. “That was one of the things that we wanted to do when we got together to talk about the record—to have him really understand what I was thinking at that time. And we just talked for hours about where I was at, our families, and out of that came the song 'You Are Not Alone.'" That’s the title track of the 2010 album, which, by the way, won the Grammy for Best Americana album this past spring.

Staples and Tweedy were also on the same page in terms of production style. In the last decade, many younger producers have helped revive the career of veteran soul singers like Solomon Burke and Bettye Lavette with records that had more of an avant-rocking-soul vibe.

But the overall production feel of “You Are Not Alone” is a trad-sounding one, heavily influenced by older gospel records and other roots-music forms. Most of the tracks boast a spare, uncluttered production style, allowing the listener to hear the space around the notes. Tweedy has praised Pops Staples as the architect of a great sound in that respect, and that he wanted to use that sound as a template for this record.

On the disc, Staples also lends her sultry, smoky contralto and distinctive vocal phrasing to some soul and blues covers (Allan Toussaint’s “Last Train,” Little Milton’s “We’re Gonna Make It” and Rev. Gary Davis’s “I Belong to the Band”).

“That was wonderful, because I knew Rev. Gary Davis back when I was just a kid,” said Staples. “He used to say to me ‘You gotta get your house in order, you gotta stay on straight street.’ And I'd say, ‘Reverend Gary, why are you telling me this—I'm a good girl!’ And he would say ‘I'm just telling you for when you get older.’ But I'm so glad we had the chance to sing those songs—Jeff suggested them and I think they fit perfectly with what we were trying to do.”

The disc also spotlights Staples’ interpretive talents on a couple of songs written by great, notable roots-pop-rock writers—John Fogerty’s “Wrote a Song For Everyone” and Randy Newman’s “Losing You.” Not to mention a couple of songs that Tweedy wrote specifically for Staples—the title song and “Only the Lord Knows.”

Staples says she feels a great fondness for those Tweedy-penned songs. “I just think he really understood me and he put that in his lyrics,” she said. “I told him really wanted to have a record that was uplifting to people. We're in such a difficult time these days—politically, economically—and I just felt we really needed something that was going to help to lift people up. And those songs just perfectly capture that (uplifting feeling).”

Regarding her snagging the Grammy—which, believe it or not, was her first-ever Grammy win: “It just feels so great. That was such an emotional experience for me,” she said. “After all these years, to finally win one was just unbelievable. I have it sitting right here in my house so I can always look over and see it. I'm so proud of winning that.

“I've been doing this now for 61 years and I ain't tired yet! I love being able to get out there to sing for people and to see all the beautiful smiling faces. And now, to look out in the audiences and see some of the younger faces—some who I can tell haven't seen us before—is really an incredible feeling. I just feel so blessed.”

Kevin Ransom, a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com, previously interviewed Mavis Staples in 2004 for the Ann Arbor News. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.