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."
