Mahalia Jackson

Mahalia Jackson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on the twenty-sixth of October 1911, one of six children in a home of hard work and deep faith. Her father labored as a stevedore on the riverfront and barbered on weekends, and he also preached at a small church; her mother kept house as a maid and laundress. When her mother died, young Mahalia was taken in and raised by an aunt in the Carrollton section of the city, coming of age amid poverty, discipline, and the sound of the Baptist church.

She began to sing as a small child in the children's choir at Plymouth Rock Baptist Church, later moving to the junior choir at Mount Moriah Baptist Church. The voice that formed there — powerful, unhurried, drenched in the blues of her birthplace — would become one of the defining instruments of the twentieth century. In 1928 she left for Chicago, joined the Johnson Singers, and set her course.

National acclaim arrived in 1947 with "Move On Up a Little Higher," which sold in the millions and stands among the best-selling gospel records ever made. She sang at Carnegie Hall, signed with Columbia Records, and carried gospel to concert halls and audiences around the world, refusing throughout to cross over into secular song. She sold an estimated twenty-two million records across a career of some forty years.

A close friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and a supporter of the movement, she lent her voice and her means to the struggle for freedom. At the 1963 March on Washington she sang before a quarter-million people, moments before King's "I Have a Dream" address. She died on the twenty-seventh of January 1972. The Queen of Gospel gave her whole voice to God and to her people — and the honor of it endures.