Mahalia Jackson, the "Queen of Gospel Song," wasborn in New
Orleans, Louisiana, on October 26, 1911. Jackson grew up singing gospel
music at the Plymouth Rock Baptist Church where her father preached. At
age sixteen, she migrated to Chicago where she supported herself by doing
housekeeping and odd jobs.
In Chicago, Jackson joined the Greater Salem Baptist Church and began
touring with a gospel quintet. The beauty of her contralto voice and the
increasing popularity of gospel music during the Depression brought Jackson
success. She made her first recordings as a soloist in the mid-1930s for
Decca and Apollo, eventually signing with Columbia records in 1954.
Jackson resisted secular music saying, "When you sing gospel you have
a feeling there is a cure for what's wrong. But when you are through with
the blues, you've got nothing to rest on." Although Jackson declined to
sing anything but gospel, she listened to and was heavily influenced by
ragtime,
jazz,
and blues artists
including Bessie
Smith, Maime Smith,
Ma
Rainey, and Ida Cox.
Jackson sang regularly at Chicago's South Side Greater Baptist Church
and often collaborated with Thomas
Dorsey, the "Father of Gospel Music." Originally a blues musician,
Dorsey began to write sacred music early in the century, using the sounds
and rhythms of blues and jazz. Over the years, gospel made a lasting impact
on blues and soul artists, including Aretha Franklin, who listened to Mahalia
Jackson sing at Rev. C. L. Franklin's New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit.
Jackson hosted a radio program in Chicago for CBS, and often her powerful
voice concluded the day's local television broadcast. She recorded with
Duke Ellington, packed Carnegie Hall on a number of occasions, and sang
for four presidents.
Jackson lent her prestige to the civil rights movement and became a
prominent figure in the struggle. In 1955, she supported the Montgomery,
Alabama bus boycott led by Dr. Martin Luther King, and, at King'srequest,
she sang "I've Been 'Buked and I BeenScorned" just before he delivered
his "I Have aDream" speech during the 1963 March on Washington.
Jackson was sixty-years-old years old when she died in the Chicago suburb
of Evergreen Park, Illinois. At her funeral, Coretta Scott King described
the singer as "black . . . proud . ..[and] beautiful." She recalled her
husband saying of Jackson, "A voice like this comes, not once in a century,
but once in a millennium."
