45
Mahalia Jackson
Queen of Gospel
She followed her aunt to the segregated coach, her heavy, rope-tied suitcase bumping against her knees as she made her way down the narrow aisle. Sliding into the worn seat, the stench from the engine thick in the air, she tried to make herself comfortable for the three-day journey that lay ahead. The women curled up close to each other during the night, covering themselves with the woolen throw they had packed for the unheated car. Because the dining car was off-limits to blacks, the two women ate sandwiches, homemade pie, and fruit from the basket they had brought for the trip.
The girl stared out the window as the Illinois Central emerged from the prairie into the predawn gray of the city. With her suitcase in her hand and almost one hundred dollars pinned to her bra—money she’d scrimped from her work as a laundress in New Orleans—sixteen-year-old Mahalia Jackson stepped foot onto the streets of the South Side of Chicago.
The Voice Heard to the End of the Block
Mahalia Jackson was born in 1911, the third of six children. She lived with thirteen family members in a New Orleans “shotgun shack,” a tiny house with just four rooms lined up in a row, one after the other. Her father worked as a dockman, hauling bales of cotton on and off barges on the riverfront. After supper he earned a few extra dollars as a barber, and on Sundays he preached at the local Baptist church. As a child Mahalia often gathered spare sticks from the riverbank, which she carried back to the house on her head, to be used for cooking and as firewood during the winter.
When her mother died, her father sent five-year-old Mahalia and her ten-year-old brother, William, to live with her aunt Duke. After school she scrubbed cypress-wood floors with lye, stuffed mattresses with corn husks and Spanish moss, and wove chair seats from sugarcane and palm fronds. When she was in the eighth grade she also found additional work as a laundress, which allowed her to save a bit of extra money.
The center of Mahalia’s universe was her family and the Mount Moriah Baptist Church, where she sang Wednesday and Friday evenings and four times on Sundays. Even as a young child Mahalia knew she possessed a special gift—an uncommonly powerful voice that could be heard outside the church and all the way to the end of the block.
Music was woven into her everyday existence in New Orleans. Mahalia especially remembered the jubilant funeral processions that took place weekly on the city streets. “After the burial, the band would strike up these religious songs, and the people from all over the city would meet at the cemetery and return, dancing in the streets to ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’” Mahalia recalled to her biographer, Jules Schwerin. “So that’s how a lot of our songs that I sing today has that type of beat, because it’s my inheritance, things that I’ve always been doing, born and raised-up and seen, that went on in New Orleans.”1
Singing for Fish and Bread
When she was just off the train in Chicago, one of Mahalia’s first goals was to find a church. She joined the Greater Salem Baptist Church and soon began to tour with the Johnson Singers, Chicago’s first professional gospel group. They sang in neighborhood churches for as little as $1.50 a night, money that came from the distribution plate that was passed around after the concert. She referred to herself as a “fish and bread singer” and often stayed at the minister’s house after her evening performance. She’d eat supper in his kitchen while he divided up the night’s earnings, minus her room and board.
To make ends meet, Mahalia earned an additional twelve dollars a week as a chambermaid in a local rooming house. Later she opened her own beauty parlor, which she expanded into a profitable florist business. She combined her singing services with her flower sales, convincing mourners who insisted she sing at the funerals of their loved ones to buy flower arrangements from her shop as well.
By 1938 Mahalia was married, had made her first recordings with Decca Records, and was traveling around the Midwest and Northeast, singing to increasingly large audiences. A number of influential figures, including her husband, Ike, tried to convince her to broaden her repertoire to include blues, theater, and other secular genres, but Mahalia refused. She vowed to sing only gospel, which she called “the staff of life” and the means by which she communicated with God. “Sometimes you feel like you’re so far from God, and then you know those deep songs have special meaning,” she explained to her biographer. “They bring back the communication between yourself and God.”2 Her refusal to acquiesce eventually led to her divorce. “We came apart over gospel singing,” she said.3 She later married a widower but divorced him as well in 1967.
As Louis “Studs” Terkel, a popular Chicago DJ, browsed in a Michigan Boulevard record store one day, he heard the recording of an unfamiliar but powerful voice singing a gospel number entitled “I’m Goin’ to Tell God about It One of These Days.” Intrigued, Terkel tracked down Mahalia and watched her perform in the Baptist churches around Chicago. “Watching her in a church . . . her relationship to the congregation was something to experience,” Terkel said. “You didn’t forget—the call and response, the give and take; she didn’t sing with her voice alone; it’s the body, the hands, the feet.”4 Terkel invited Mahalia into his studio for a live interview and continued to play her only recording at the time—the song he’d heard in the Michigan Boulevard record store—again and again, introducing her voice to the world beyond the black church community.
In 1948, Mahalia recorded “Move On Up a Little Higher” for Apollo Records, which sold millions of copies and became the highest-selling gospel single in history. After that, Mahalia was in great demand, making frequent radio and television appearances and eventually performing at Carnegie Hall in 1950 to a racially segregated audience. By 1954 she had her own gospel program on CBS television. She began to tour extensively, earning up to a thousand dollars for a single concert. Because she’d been cheated one too many times, she insisted on payment in cash before the end of each performance, slipping the wad of bills into her bra before returning to the stage for her final numbers.
Although white audiences responded enthusiastically to her concerts and television appearances, Mahalia faced racism and segregation at every turn, particularly when she toured in the South. Restaurants would not serve her, gas stations would not fill her lavender Cadillac, and restrooms were never available. While on the road, she often slept in her car. “To find a place to eat and sleep in a colored neighborhood meant losing so much time,” she recalled.5 Even in her hometown of Chicago she was not immune to racial threats. After she purchased a single-level house in a predominantly white neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side, her living room windows were hit with air-rifle pellets.
Mahalia made her debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, and in 1958 she performed with Duke Ellington and his band at the Newport Jazz Festival. The two released an album together the same year under Columbia Records entitled Black, Brown and Beige. By the end of the decade she had achieved international fame, with a performance schedule that included singing at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.
Mahalia’s fame and her personal struggle with racism made her a natural advocate for the civil rights movement. As early as 1956, civil rights leaders called on her to lend both her powerful voice and financial support to the rallies, marches, and demonstrations, and by the early 1960s, gospel music and spirituals had become the soundtrack to the civil rights movement, with Mahalia Jackson at the forefront. She was invited by Martin Luther King Jr. to sing in front of 250,000 protesters at the second march on Washington in 1963, the largest demonstration in the history of the nation. At King’s request, she opened her set with “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned,” one of her trademark songs. Just five years later, she sang at King’s funeral and later recorded an album of his favorite songs, The Best Loved Hymns of Dr. M. L. King.
Well loved and respected though she was, Mahalia had a dark side too. She was known for her stubbornness, her fiery temper, and her stinginess, even long after she was earning a substantial salary. Her longtime pianist, Mildred Falls, who had accompanied Mahalia since the early 1950s, suffered the consequences. Mildred died in Chicago in the 1970s, penniless and rejected by the one person who should not have abandoned her. Abysmally underpaid by Mahalia for years, Mildred was dropped by the singer in favor of other accompanists when she complained about her low salary. “You couldn’t talk to Mahalia about Mildred’s situation,” recalled John Sellers, a friend of the family. “When Mahalia had money, nobody could talk to her.” She wouldn’t accept criticism of her behavior from anyone—“not from Mildred, or me, or any of her husbands,” John said. “She had the habit of sayin’: ‘I’m Mahalia Jackson, you hear?!’”6 While Mahalia regularly earned between seven hundred and three thousand dollars a night, Mildred was paid two hundred dollars a week plus expenses. When Mildred requested an additional one hundred dollars a week, Mahalia fired her.
Making a Joyful Noise
In spite of near-constant enticement to expand her repertoire beyond gospel, Mahalia rarely strayed into secular genres. She enrolled in only one music class in her life, and when the instructor suggested she sing slower and sweeter to appeal to more white folks, she refused, walking out of the classroom and never returning for another lesson. Her style—dramatic, loud, and demonstrative—was her own, and she sang for one reason only: to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord.” She chastised critics who considered gospel simple or lacking in artistry: “Some people are a little ashamed of gospel songs and folk songs, because it doesn’t take a lot of long study, and they are simple songs of people’s hearts. They think that if a song comes from the heart, then maybe it’s too easy. Well, I don’t agree with them! No one can hurt the gospel because the gospel is strong, like a two-headed sword is strong.”7
The same could be said about Mahalia Jackson herself. Throughout her life she remained as strong as a two-headed sword—determined to make it on her own as a young girl living on the South Side of Chicago, determined to use her gifts for God, determined to sing about her Savior alone. Mahalia Jackson sang out her love for Jesus in a voice bold, vibrant, and strong. Nothing or no one—not poverty or racism, temptation or scorn—could quiet her joyful noise for the Lord.8