This is trial-and-tribulation music.
— Mahalia Jackson, 1968
In Mahalia’s soul, the surging NOLA blues had already gelled with the sacred. When I get to heaven/ Going to sing and shout / Be nobody there to put me out. She’s talked about her relationship to “the drum, the cymbal, the tambourine, the steel triangle,” and Jackson brought with her to Chicago — and so to the world — the ceremonial relief of NOLA funeral marches, and the hard beats of poor peoples’ organ- and piano-less churches. Jackson sang to and for the Lord. Jackson sang all her life to get people out of their seats, and to be paid fairly for it. “The only thing we are interested in,” she's said, “is equal rights where we can make a living. To survive! You understand?” Divorced twice. No children. Known to carry as much as fifteen thousand dollars in her bra. And Jackson’s reputation for penny-pinching is fairly
etched in stone. In 1959 she both opened at Carnegie Hall and appeared in Douglas Sirk’s successful and racially subversive Imitation of Life. In 1963, at the request of Martin Luther King Jr, Jackson sang — You know my soul look back and wonder / How did we make it over — as direct prelude to his “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. — Danyel Smith,
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below shot is at the March — one of my fave images ⬇️
