Black History
Mahalia Jackson
(1911-1972)
Singer
Mahalia Jackson has been acclaimed America's greatest gospel singer by world press and publicity. She is certainly the best known, with a career that included television, radio, and concerts. Her early repertoire leaned heavily upon songs of her Baptist beginnings such as "Amazing Grace," and "The Day is Past and Gone." She recorded her first record in May 1937 for Decca, "God's Gonna Separate the Wheat from the Tares," and the Baptist hymn "Keep Me Every Day." From that point on, Jackson's talent and deep-rooted faith ensured that she had the whole world in her hands. Wilfred Mellers, in Gospel Women of the Night, says: "The magnificent voice and the fervent faith are almost inseparable; a voice of such vibrancy, over so wide a range, creates a sound that is as all-embracing, as secure as the womb, from which singer and listener may be reborn."
Mahalia Jackson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 26, 1911 or 1912, and died of heart failure in Chicago on January 27, 1972. She was the daughter of Charity Clark, a laundress and maid, and Johnny Jackson, a Baptist preacher, barber, and longshoreman. Mahalia Jackson was raised without the presence of her father. Her mother died when Jackson was five. She was raised by an extended family of one brother, six aunts, and several half-brothers and sisters—children of her father. Her grandparents had been born into slavery and were laborers on Louisiana rice cotton plantations. Some of her relatives were entertainers and played valses, quadrilles, polkas, and mazurkas at parties for white people. They also played blues and rags in Ma Rainey's Circus.
The strong musical life of New Orleans in the early 1900s made a profound impression upon the young Mahalia Jackson. She lived next door to a Holiness church whose rhythms and instruments appealed to her growing musical development. Jackson knew well the standard hymn tradition of the Mount Moriah Baptist Church where her family worshipped. In addition to the sacred music, she was surrounded by music of the Mardi Gras, street vendors, and the bars and dance halls of New Orleans's black community. These were the early days of the birth of jazz in Storyville—a place where Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Jelly Roll Morton got their start in the 1920s.
During childhood, Jackson had to work to help support her family, even while she attended grammar school. Biographical accounts differ concerning the time at which she left school—the fourth or the eighth grade. An autobiography written with Evan McLeod Wylie in 1966, Movin' On Up, states that Mahalia Jackson moved from New Orleans to Chicago in 1928 at sixteen years of age (41). There she joined the Greater Salem Baptist Church and its choir. At Salem, she also began a career in gospel singing as a member of the Johnson Gospel Singers.
Jackson's real ambition after arriving in Chicago was to become a nurse; however, she worked as a laundress and studied beauty culture at Madame C. J. Walker's and the Scott Institute of Beauty Culture. With that training, Jackson began the first of her several business ventures. She opened a beauty shop.
In 1936 Jackson married Isaac Hockenhull, a college-educated entrepreneur. He encouraged her business aspirations but realized the great potential of her developing musical talent as a bigger source of income. A moving chapter of Laurraine Goreau's book, Just Mahalia, Baby, tells how Hockenhull, or "Ike" as he was called, persuaded Jackson to audition for the Works Projects Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre production of Hot Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan. In a well-known story, Ike told Mahalia Jackson, "Halie, nobody can touch your voice. You've got a future in singing. It's not right for you to throw it away hollering in churches. Woman, you want to nickel and dime all your life?" (78). Auditioning reluctantly, Jackson sang the old spiritual, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child." Even though she won the audition, she turned down the offer as from Decca records to sing the blues. It was Hockenhull's desire to see Jackson turn to the more lucrative world of blues and popular music. Her steadfast refusal to sing the blues throughout her long career is documented in an exchange with Louis Armstrong. Returning to Chicago from a European tour in 1937, he tried to persuade Jackson, saying: "Got you a spot with the band, make you some real green, get to move around. You don't have to show me, I know what you can do with the blues." She replied, "I know what I can do with it too, baby, and that's not sing it. Child, I been reborn!" (Gorean, 75).
Just as a subsequent marriage in 1965 to musician Sigmond Galloway, Jackson's marriage to Ike Hockenhull ended in divorce.
A historic moment in gospel music brought together Jackson and the "Father of Gospel Music," composer Thomas A. Dorsey, also of Chicago in 1929. He became her musical advisor and accompanist from 1937 to 1946. Jackson sang Dorsey's songs in church programs and at conventions to promote the new songwriter's compositions. Their association in fourteen years of travel was highly successful. Her signature performance of "Precious Lord Take My Hand," composed by Dorsey, became one of the most requested songs in her growing repertoire.
Vocal Style, Delivery and Repertoire Gain Fame for Jackson
The Jackson swinging beat coupled with an intense, expressive, and emotional performance met with resistance in many black churches. Some felt the music to be too jazzy—too worldly for church worship. Viv Broughton commented in his book, Black Gospel:
The more sophisticated and middle class black people in the northern cities weren't quite so taken with the idea of shouts and moans and Holiness excesses. It was all so retrogressive to them, a harking back to old indignities and to old African roots they would quite happily prefer to leave behind (53).
However, by 1947 Jackson had become the official soloist of the National Baptist Convention. Besides the traditional Baptist hymns and Dorsey songs, she excelled in, and became nationally known through the songs of the Baptist preacher, the Reverend W. Herbert Brewster of Memphis. Her recording on Apollo Records of "Move On Up A Little Higher" sold more than two million copies in 1946. She featured songs of other notable Chicago songwriters who were markedly increasing in number under the influence of Dorsey and the rising tide for gospel music in churches, in concert, and on record. Among them, Jackson recorded "I Can Put my Trust in Jesus" and "Let the Power of the Holy Ghost Fall On Me" by Kenneth Morris, a selection that earned her the French Grand Prix du Disque in 1949. During the 1950s she was featured on the noted Chicago journalist Studs Terkel's television program. By 1954 she had her own radio and television show while owning a flower shop in Chicago and traveling to perform concerts.
Signing her most lucrative record contract with Columbia Records in 1954, Jackson's concerts were increasingly heard in concert halls with fewer in the churches. Likewise, her repertoire expanded to include arrangements with orchestra in place of the piano and organ that she previously used. From the Columbia releases came "Down By the Riverside," "Didn't It Rain," "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho," "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands," and that New Orleans staple, "When the Saints Go Marching In."
Among the notable achievements of Jackson, many are "firsts" for those in the gospel music field. She appeared in concert at Carnegie Hall in 1950 and at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958.
Author Tony Heilbut notes Jackson's political concerns:
During the sixties, Mahalia was a loyal friend and supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King... . He loved her music... . She began featuring 'We Shall Overcome' at concerts. At King's funeral Mahalia sang his last request, "Precious Lord" (103).
Earlier, Jackson was featured at the 1963 March on Washington rally at which King made his famous speech, "I Have a Dream." On that occasion, she rocked thousands on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial with the Reverend Brewster's classic, "How I Got Over." Jackson strongly supported the civil rights movement and was a militant supporter of King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also supported Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley and sang at the 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.
Jackson Experiences European Success
Jackson first toured Europe in 1952. Music critics there heralded her as the world's greatest gospel singer, a rare artist with a wide range. Jackson's recordings had been introduced in Europe by the French jazz historian, Hugh Panassie, who was impressed by her voice and singing style. With a weekly radio program on ORTF (all-France radio), Panassie played Jackson's recordings regularly. The radio show was widely listened to in Great Britain and in other countries in Western Europe. In Paris she was called "The Angel of Peace" and became widely celebrated throughout the continent, singing to sold-out and standing-room-only crowds. At London's famed Royal Albert Hall, critic Max Jones spoke of her charm. "When she dances those little church steps at the end of a rocking number, you need a heart of stone to remain unsmiling" (Broughton, 54).
Jackson told Jones in one of hundreds of interviews for the press, "I don't work for money. I sing because I love to sing" (Broughton, 56). Her concerts consisted of seventeen to twenty selections even when a crowded schedule called for concerts on successive nights. She toured Europe in 1952, 1962, and 1963-1964. She also sang in Africa, Japan, and India in 1970. She met heads of state and royalty, including Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and members of the royal family in Japan.
The many historic accounts of Jackson's life usually speak of her generosity to family, friends, and young people. She received the Silver Dove Award "for work of quality doing the most good for international understanding." Jackson, according to biographer Laurraine Goreau, had an unfulfilled dream to build a temple where young people might study gospel music, religion, and academics. She established a Mahalia Jackson Scholarship Foundation for young people who wished to attend college.
Among the friends of Mahalia Jackson were most of her contemporaries in the gospel music field: Roberta Martin, Sallie Martin, Willie Mae Ford Smith, J. Robert Bradley, Robert Anderson, officials of Thomas A. Dorsey's gospel music convention, including the Ward Singers, and Rosetta Tharpe. Jackson encouraged the careers of Della Reese, Aretha Franklin, and James Cleveland. She had scores of friends throughout the country and around the world, among them radio and television personalities such as Ed Sullivan, Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Percy Faith, Harry Belafonte, Albertina Walker, Brother John Sellers, and New York promoter Joe Bostic, who presented Jackson at Carnegie Hall and at his spectacularly successful gospel concerts at Randall's Island. She knew the Lyndon Johnsons, John F. Kennedys, and Harry S. Truman.
Tony Heilbut devotes a complete chapter in his book, The Gospel Sound, to "Mahalia the Queen." He calls her "the vocal, physical, spiritual symbol of gospel music. Her large (260 pounds), noble proportions, her face, contorted into something resembling the Mad Duchess, her soft speaking voice and hugh, rich contralto, all made her gospel's one superstar" (89). Henry Pleasants, author of The Great American Popular Singers, stated: "She would land on a note or a word she particularly liked, or wished to emphasize, and mouth it, or repeat it, or repeat parts of it, or shake it, or bite into it in a manner which often reminded me of a terrier puppy playing tug-o'-war with an old sock or shoe (201.) In a later entry in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, which Pleasants coauthored with gospel music historian Horace C. Boyer, it was stated:
Jackson was not the first, and possible not the finest, gospel singer, but it was largely through her compelling contralto voice and her personality that people of all races throughout the world came to respect gospel music as an idiom distinct from classical black spirituals (524).
Selected songs of Mahalia Jackson are published in Favorites of Mahalia Jackson, the World's Greatest Gospel Singer (New York: Hill and Range Songs, 1955). Some of her noted recordings include: In the Upper Room with Mahalia Jackson, EMI 335X 1753; Mahalia Jackson Recorded Live in Europe (1961), Columbia Records C88526 LP; Mahalia Jackson—World's Greatest Gospel Singer and Falls-Jones Ensemble, Columbia Records CL 2004, CS8759; Mahalia Jackson's Latest Hits, Columbia CL1473 CS 8264; and Silent Night— Songs for Christmas, Columbia CL1903, CS8703.
Awards
She received the Silver Dove Award "for work of quality doing the most good for international understanding."
Further Readings
Broughton, Viv. Black Gospel. New York: Sterling, 1985.
Current Biography Yearbook. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1957. Includes photographs.
Dahl, Linda. Stormy Weather. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Goreau, Laurraine. Just Mahalia, Baby. Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1975. Includes photographs.
Heilbut, Tony. The Gospel Sound. New York: Limelight Editions, 1971.
Jackson, Mahalia with Evan McLeod Wylie. Movin' On Up. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966. Includes photographs.
Levine, Lawrence W. "Mahalia Jackson." Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Low, W. Augustus, and Virgil A. Clift, eds. Encyclopedia of Black America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981.
Mellers, Wilfred. Angels of the Night: Popular Female Singers of Our Time. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Pleasants, Henry, The Great American Popular Singers. Saint Louis: Fireside Books, 1985.
Pleasants, Henry, and Horace Boyer. "Mahalia Jackson." New Grove Dictionary of American Music. London: Macmillan, 1986.
Southern, Eileen. Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982.
Source: Notable Black American Women, Book 1.