There were two Mahalia Jacksons, and both of them belong right up there with Louis Armstrong.
One Mahalia was the soul of gospel music. She was the star, the face of gospel, just as Armstrong was the face of jazz. The other Mahalia was the sound of the civil rights movement. The big fat lady with the big fat voice resonated throughout America when she stood by Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and shouted to 200,000 black people, “I been ‘buked and I been scorned; I’m gonna tell my Lord when I get home just how long you been treating me wrong.”
It was a nation that Mahalia Jackson was rebuking for its treatment of her people, treatment that she also had endured despite 20 years of celebrity among white audiences and on mainline television shows. Most of white America had never heard gospel music until Mahalia. Most of white America had never heard “We Shall Overcome” until Mahalia sang what became the most powerful and pervasive social plaint of the second half of the century.
“Halie” Jackson, like Louis Armstrong, was from New Orleans, where she lived near the high levee that keeps the Mississippi River from boiling all over the city. She was raised by a matriarchal aunt after her mother died when she was 5. Her early life as an uneducated laundress and child care servant was wound deeply into the church, where her aunt would lead the family two or three times a week and all day Sunday.
It was in the church that Mahalia’s rich contralto first burst loose with traditional hymns. And it was on early crank-up phonographs that she heard smuggled records of Bessie Smith singing the blues, the laments that decent colored people like her Aunt Duke forbid in the house. Mahalia Jackson never would sing the blues, although in later years Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and just about everyone pleaded with her to enter show business. “Any Negro can sing the blues,” she scoffed.
But while she always dedicated her singing to praise of the Lord, she never forgot the sound of Bessie Smith.
In 1928 Jackson moved with another aunt to Chicago’s South Side, where the sounds of Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton and Earl “Fatha” Hines were pouring out of the black enclave. She worked as a hotel maid, ironed shirts, watched children and joined the Greater Salem Baptist Church, where she quickly became a soloist.
As with any great artist, or for that matter almost anyone who achieves greatness, there is always that combination of skill and timing. Just when Mahalia Jackson was belting out her church solos, Dr. Thomas Dorsey was only a few blocks away writing a new kind of church music.
Dorsey had once been a jazz musician. As “Georgia Tom” he accompanied the great Bessie Smith for many years. But after his wife died in childbirth, Dorsey turned to a religious life and began composing church music. But just like Mahalia, with all her non-theological faith, he could not escape the sound of the blues, and the music he wrote was filled with laments and wails and swing. “I wanted to get the feeling and the moans and the blues into the songs,” he once told the Chicago Tribune. “Before that, they would sing `Spiri-tu-al-fellow-ship-of-the-Jor-dan land.’ Jubilee songs. Wasn’t nothing to them. But then I turned those blues moans on, modified some of the stuff from way back in the jazz era, bashed it up and smoothed it in. It had that beat, that rhythm. And people were wild about it.”
And Mahalia began to sing it. Dorsey’s biggest hit, “Precious Lord,” became one of the staples of her performances, and she joined Pilgrim Baptist Church, where she was surrounded by such other gospel greats as Clara Ward and the Barrett Sisters.
Her first record, “God Gonna Separate the Wheat from the Tares,” was cut in 1934, but the swinging sound of gospel was still not accepted among the middle-class black churches. Gospel grew because there was a vacuum. The Depression had forced the closing of many of the jazz clubs and nightspots. Many of the great musicians of the 1920s were without work, and even the most successful, like Armstrong, resorted to European tours to make money.
For a decade Jackson crisscrossed the South and Midwest, often driving alone to Detroit or St. Louis or any town where a church group wanted to see the majestic, towering woman who shook her hips and her whole body, and whose internal exhilaration burst forth in her voice as her combs flew from her hair and her throat spewed the sounds of black faith in God. She regularly traveled across the country to the annual National Baptist Convention, and regularly was refused admittance to hotels and restaurants, eating cold cuts in cold cars, indignities that later made her one of the first and most fervent supporters of King and the civil rights crusade.
She made some money and she got to be somewhat of a miser, stacking thousands of dollars in her suitcase among the underwear. She also sent money back to New Orleans to support a host of cousins. She married Isaac Hockenhall, a chemist, in 1931, but Hockenhall was an inveterate horse player whom she divorced in 1943, although they remained friends all her life.
In 1946, Mahalia cut a record for Apollo called “Move on Up a Little Higher.” It sold 2 million copies, an unheard-of number for a black artist selling mostly in the black community. The hits continued throughout the 1940s. Studs Terkel began playing her records on his radio show, and Chicagoans were the first whites in America to hear the big black woman singing the glory of God.
In 1950 she appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” although that and all her subsequent television appearances were far more placid and sedate than the style Mahalia delivered in person. Despite her many refusals and fears, a concert was scheduled for Oct. 4, 1950, in Carnegie Hall. It was a raging success, and she made repeat appearances there for years. In the 1950s she also toured Europe and the Middle East. She was particularly popular in Israel. Although she never broke a pledge to God that she would never appear in a theater, she was flexible enough to join Duke Ellington’s band in a performance at the Newport Jazz Festival during the 1950s.
In Chicago, she opened a florist shop and a beauty parlor and despite her largesse to relatives was a shrewd businesswoman and became a millionaire. She bought a home in 1952 in a white neighborhood of the South Side. Shots were fired at her house, but eventually the acts of violence disappeared. So did her white neighbors, who began selling their homes. In a few short years Jackson was living in an all black neighborhood again.
In the 1950s Jackson was signed by WBBM to do a local television show, with Studs Terkel as the off-camera host. Station officials were apprehensive about Terkel because he was, during the red witch-hunt era, listed as one of those radicals who signed petitions outrageously supporting world peace and civil rights. But Mahalia, who insisted that Terkel had discovered her, also insisted he be a part of the show, which ran twice a week. When Jackson asked why the show wasn’t broadcast nationally, she suffered another indignity. A television show with a black star wouldn’t get any sponsors in the South, she was told. “Halie” Jackson didn’t have much education, but she couldn’t figure out why if her records sold all over the South and white people cheered her all over the South she wouldn’t get any sponsors. But she never did.
She often sang at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the pastor was the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. When she heard about King Jr.’s crusade in Montgomery she became the focal point of fund-raising. The Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy and King had visited her in Chicago to ask her help, and Jackson organized many concerts and enlisted the help of other black entertainers to support the movement in the 1950s and 1960s, spreading the sound and the spirit of “We Shall Overcome” through America’s black communities.
In 1964 Jackson married for a second time, to Sigmund “Minters” Galloway, and that union also ended in a divorce shortly before her death in 1972. She had no children, but she had millions of admirers. More than 50,000 people attended her funeral.
She made the kind of gospel music that thrived into the 1990s with the work of the Winans Family, the Barrett Sisters, Albertina Walker and Pops Staples.
“Without Mahalia Jackson there would have been no Aretha Franklin. Without Mahalia Jackson there would be no Grammies for gospel. Gospel music would not be the thriving industry it is today,” said Howard Reich.
More important, it thrives in churches across Chicago and around the world.
PERFORMING ARTS TOP 10
1. Louis Armstrong, jazz musician
2. Mahalia Jackson, (above)
3. Georg Solti, CSO conductor
4. Fritz Reiner, CSO conductor
5. Benny Goodman, jazz musician
6. Jelly Roll Morton, jazz musician
7. Muddy Waters, blues musician
8. Nat “King” Cole, singer
9. Ruth Page, dancer
10. Sally Rand, fan dancer
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Your turn: Who would be on your list of top Chicago performing arts figures of the century? Write to Tempo, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611. Or e-mail to ctc-tempo@tribune.com
