We’re now well into the Christmas music season, that odd time of the year when songs related to winter or Christmas which are forbidden most of the year suddenly become ubiquitous.
During Christmas you can hear music in stores and on radio from artists you don’t hear at all during the rest of the year, including a lot of vintage material. Besides Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, you might be lucky enough to hear Mahalia Jackson as you stroll the aisles in Wal-Mart. She released several Christmas-themed LPs for Columbia in the 1950s and 60s, all of them very successful commercially so they get trotted out every year.
Unlike some artists who suddenly get religious around December, Jackson was a perfect fit for the Christmas genre. All her life she steadfastly refused to sing secular music although she had many lucrative offers. Christmas music allowed her to achieve the success she craved without compromising her principles.
That desire for success came about naturally.
She was born Mahala Jackson in 1911 into a very large and poor family in New Orleans. Her namesake Aunt Mahala was charged with raising her after her mother died. Aunt Duke, as she was called, was a very strict Baptist who allowed no secular music in the home. However another one of her aunts was a vaudeville entertainer and her son surreptitiously introduced Jackson to the music of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, both of whom influenced her singing profoundly. She also happened to live next to a Sanctified Church, where she could hear music that was much livelier than what the more dour Baptists deemed appropriate.
When she was sixteen, Jackson moved to Chicago to live with another aunt.
Much is made of the “mass migration” of blacks from the south to northern cities as it relates to music. Chicago jazz and Chicago blues are well-known and documented. Chicago gospel is not as celebrated, which is a shame. When Jackson went to Chicago, gospel music wasn’t even a thing.
What we now know as gospel music came about from the vision and dedication of one Thomas A. Dorsey, who also moved to Chicago at about the same time as Jackson did. The two of them eventually became responsible for what is now called The Golden Age of Gospel.
Dorsey was the son of a Baptist minister who, to the dismay of his family, was always attracted to show business and blues. He was a child prodigy who quickly mastered several instruments and at a very young age he was accompanying greats such as Ma Rainey. Using the stage name Georgia Tom he became a successful blues artist in what was known as the hokum style, suggestive novelty songs. In 1928 he teamed up with Tampa Red to record his raunchy composition It’s Tight Like That which was a sensation, selling millions of copies.
Despite his blues success he never lost his connection with the church. Dorsey felt strongly that church music was too staid and when the Great Depression hit he set about writing songs that were both spiritual and emotionally uplifting. He called his new style gospel to differentiate it from hymns or what was called evangelical music.
In 1932 his wife Nettie and newborn son died while Dorsey away touring. In his grief, he wrote what is perhaps the greatest gospel song ever, Precious Lord, Take My Hand. He then dedicated his life to the church and gospel music. He formed his own music publishing company and relentlessly promoted his songs and approach to music at conventions and concerts he put on around the country. He made Chicago his home base because it was teeming with talented church singers.
By this time Mahalia Jackson (she added the extra i to her name in 1931) was a leading force in that crowded field. She could walk into any room, or church, and blow everybody away.
For those of us familiar with her regal and motherly stage persona in the 1960s it may be surprising to discover that in at this time she was banned by some churches because she her singing was too bluesy and her dancing too sexual. She rocked the church.
Unfortunately she did not make many records at that time so we only have anecdotal evidence. Her first recording for Decca in 1936 had only mild commercial success. Because she sang so much like Bessie Smith, the company wanted her to sing blues, and so did her husband at the time.
Mahalia had decided to live a pure life, so she divorced her husband and gave up on the idea of recording.
She was pure but she had a good business sense.
Her former husband’s sister was an accomplished cosmetician who had developed numerous products. Jackson learned the trade from her and opened her own beauty salon to stabilize her income and continued singing in churches around the mid-west.
Mahalia Jackson and Thomas A. Dorsey were a match made in heaven. They teamed up, Jackson made Precious Lord her signature tune and together they successfully promoted Dorsey’s music all over the country for 14 years.
In 1946 Jackson got a recording contract with Apollo Records, a small New York City label. Apollo’s records were not well distributed and they were pressed on poor quality material but the music was brilliant, by far her best recordings. Her third release, Move On Up a Little Higher, was a million seller and made her a star. Apollo leased the recordings to various companies around the world and they were met with particular acclaim in Europe.
In 1949 she recorded her first Christmas carol, Silent Night. It was a stunning, powerful rendition unlike any other and was particularly well received in Europe, I play it every year on the Backbeat Holiday show.. You may be more familiar with the version she later recorded for Columbia, which is nice, but the Apollo version is well worth searching out. All her Apollo recordings have been re-issued many times on various labels so they are not hard to find.
By the 1950s Mahalia was an international star; she sang in grand concert halls (including Carnegie Hall) instead of church basements. Ever the entrepreneur, her beauty salon was now a chain. In 1954 she signed with Columbia Records, a very middle-of-the road label that was not active in the gospel field and didn’t want to be. They saw her as a mainstream artist and though they could not convince her to record secular songs, they did get her to commercialize her sound.
She was wildly successful but although she appeared on most of the big TV shows she could not get her own because the networks were afraid of losing southern sponsors. When she purchased a house in an upscale area of Chicago her new neighbours fired shots at her windows. Frustrated and angry she joined forces with Martin Luther King Jr. and became prominent in the civil rights movement.
At that time Harry Belafonte called her “the single most powerful black woman in the United States” but sadly, the thing that made her great, her music, is not heard much today. Her numerous Columbia records are too saccharine for gospel and blues fans, but too religious (and dated) for the mainstream so we only get to hear her on radio or in a public place at Christmas.
That at least, is something to be thankful for.