Moving On Up

Mahalia Jackson never sang the blues. "Blues are the songs of despair," she liked to say. "Gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you sing gospel you have the feeling there is a cure for what's wrong." Mahalia had the gift of making her audiences feel there was a cure too. She began her performance with a Bible reading ("to give me inner strength"), then just seemed to brim over with music. Shaking her head till the combs flew out of her hair, whacking her hands together or stretching her arms ecstatically over her head, she raised her creamy contralto in such Salvationist swingers as Just Over the Hill or I Will Move On Up a Little Higher. Last week Mahalia herself moved on up, dying of heart disease at 60 after several years of poor health.

The gospel songs that Mahalia sang were descended from the Negro spirituals of the old slave plantations. As the granddaughter of slaves, she came by the heritage naturally; as the daughter of a stevedore in New Orleans, she just as naturally learned to combine it with the new beat of urban blues singers like Bessie Smith. She went to work at 13 as a washerwoman. After moving to Chicago at 16, she was a hotel maid, laundress and baby sitter before her choir solos won her a job on a crosscountry gospel crusade. Chicago remained her home until the end. There she married and divorced twice (no children), opened a beauty parlor and a florist shop with her earnings ($100,000 a year at her peak).

Initially, Mahalia had trouble getting her music accepted in larger, middle-class black churches because of its bumptious echoes of a life most of the parishioners preferred to forget. But as recordings widened her fame, the church doors opened. So, after World War II, did the ears and minds of a steadily increasing number of whites, who bought her records and listened to her weekly radio show. Thus she helped to prime the mass public for later gospel and soul singers.

As she began appearing in classical bastions like Carnegie Hall and receiving invitations from presidents and prime ministers, Mahalia emerged as a symbol of the civil rights movement. In 1963 millions of TV viewers watched as, standing next to Martin Luther King just before his "I've Got a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, she summed up the frustrations and aspirations of the movement with I Been 'Buked and I Been Scorned. But as star or symbol, she refused to take herself too seriously. "Ever since I began singing in the big concert halls," she said, "people have been trying to teach me to be grand, but I just can't do it." In her singing, she did it better than she knew.

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