Mahalia Jackson CDs

Gospels, Spirituals & Hymns   /  The Best of Mahalia Jackson  /  Black, Brown and Beige   / The Best Loved Spirituals

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Mahalia Jackson: Saturday Night Rhythms 

and Sunday Morning Lyrics

By Cornish Rogers

Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who died in Chicago on January 27 [1972], symbolized through her life and music the pilgrimage of black people in the United States during the past half century.

Born in New Orleans in 1911, she early in life became as intimately acquainted with the cadences of black Baptist worship as she was with the daily routine of scrubbing floors in white people's homes. the daughter of a stevedore-preacher, young Mahalia perceived within her won life a tension expressed musically in the dichotomy between the blues and the spirituals. After moving to Chicago in 1927 (joining hundreds of thousands of other blacks in the migration to northern cities), she worked during the week as a beautician and on Sundays became an ardent performer of a developing form of church music that melded Baptist lyrics and a "sanctified beat" with the style of blues and jazz.

Gospel -- as it was called -- was born on Chicago's south side more than 40 years ago; but because of its jazz-styled delivery the music was for many years shunned by middle-class black churches. Sung chiefly by storefront Pentecostal, Holiness and sanctified congregations, gospel languished relatively unnoticed by the larger white society until it was brought to public attention in the 40s by such popular singers as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who managed to attract both churchgoing folk and more worldly black audiences with her winsome combination of Saturday night rhythms and Sunday morning lyrics. It was not until 1946 that Mahalia, who had recorded her first songs ten years earlier, became nationally recognized; by 1953 she received international acclaim on a European concert tour.

Like the gospel music she sang, Mahalia bridged the gap between the sacred and the secular in her own life without compromising her deep-rooted fundamentalist faith. Moving easily among people from both worlds, she embodied the truth of James Cone's contention (expressed in his soon to-be-published book The Spirituals and the Blues) that both secular blues and sacred spirituals "flow from the same bedrock of experience," though the blues deal only with the existential while the spirituals look to the supernatural.

Mahalia numbered among her most cherished friends from both ends of the theological and political spectrums. For instance, J.H. Jackson (president (president of the National Baptist Convention) and Martin Luther King, Jr. -- leaders who were often at odds with each other -- both counted themselves as close friends and admirers of hers. It was she who sang "I been 'buked and I been scorned" before a half-million people at the Lincoln memorial in 1963 just preceding Dr. King's now-famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the greatest of all civil rights demonstrations; and it was J.H. Jackson who delivered the eulogy at her funeral.

But it was the singer's insistence upon remaining unalterably herself that marked her as unique. Unashamed of her humble origins, she projected through her down-to-earth personality and her unassuming manner that quality which black people call "homebodyness" -- as though she were a close relative from "down home." Like her friend Louis Armstrong, she achieved a universality by living faithfully within the confines she aspired to become the best. because Mahalia's life rang true to itself, it rings true for all of us.

Source: The Christian Century (1 March 1972)

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