Mahalia Jackson
1911 – 1972 · United States
Known for: American gospel singer, the Queen of Gospel and a voice of the civil rights movement
“She sang the gospel, and she would sing nothing else.”
Biography
Mahalia Jackson was born in New Orleans in 1911, the granddaughter of people who had been born into slavery, and grew up as the thirteenth person in her aunt's three room house in the Sixteenth Ward. Her mother died when she was five, and the aunt who raised her was strict and quick tempered. Between school, scrubbing floors and the levee where the children fished, church was the other half of her childhood. She joined the children's choir at Plymouth Rock Baptist Church at the age of four, but the sound that marked her came through the wall of the small Pentecostal congregation next door, where the singing was driven by drum, tambourine and stamping feet. She never had a music lesson in her life.
Jackson moved to Chicago as an adolescent and joined the Johnson Singers, one of the earliest gospel groups anywhere. For fifteen years she was what she called a fish and bread singer, taking odd jobs between funerals, revivals and political rallies. She had listened as a girl to the blues of Bessie Smith, and she carried that phrasing into Protestant hymns and into the new compositions of Thomas Dorsey, improvising freely over melody and rhythm in a contralto of enormous weight. In 1947 Move On Up a Little Higher sold two million copies and reached second place on the Billboard chart, both firsts for gospel music. She wept and moved as she sang, and audiences who had never entered a black church came to hear her. Offers to record secular material followed her for the rest of her life, and she turned down every one of them.
Her success opened the world to gospel. Jackson was the first gospel recording artist to tour Europe, appeared constantly on radio and television, sang the national anthem at John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Ball in 1961 and sold an estimated twenty two million records. Having lived under segregation in the South and met hostility from white neighbours when she integrated a Chicago street, she gave her voice to the civil rights movement, singing at fundraisers and from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington in 1963, before Martin Luther King Jr., whose family she counted as friends, rose to speak. She died near Chicago on 27 January 1972 at the age of sixty, and tens of thousands of people filed past her coffin in Chicago and again in New Orleans. Soul, rhythm and blues and rock and roll singers were all working in a form she had opened.