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In the early 1950s, Mahalia Jackson found herself before a sellout crowd in New York City’s famed Carnegie Hall. “I stood there,” she later recalled,
“gazing out at thousands of men and women who had come to hear me – a baby nurse and a washerwoman – on the stage where great artists like Caruso and Lily Pons and Marian Anderson had sung, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to make a sound.”
But sing, she
did, and “The more I sang, the more people in the audience cried out for joy. As the beat picked up, hands started flying, and feet started tapping, and folks began to shout all over the Great Hall.”
Jackson had risen from humble beginnings in New Orleans to become
hailed as the world’s greatest gospel singer – the “Queen of gospel music.”
Mahalia’s formal education ended abruptly in the eighth grade when she took a job as a laundress. In 1928, although only 16, Mahalia moved to Chicago, where she lived with two of her aunts.
Her plans to study nursing were dashed when one of her aunts became ill, making it necessary for Mahalia to work to help make ends meet.
In 1932, the untrained Mahalia paid a hard-earned 4 dollars to her professor on Chicago’s Southside – for what turned out to be
her one and only singing lesson. The professor berated his would-be pupil, telling her to “stop hollering” and sing her songs “so that white people can understand them.”
Mahalia never went back for another lesson...read more
