From Movin' On Up

Mahalia Jackson
(Louisiana, 1911 - 1972)

Mahalia Jackson brought gospel music to a large audience and has been described as one of the great voices of the twentieth century, as well as "the greatest gospel singer of all time...." She gained popularity and success with her powerful singing and soulful compositions, including her personal anthem, "I'm Going to Move on Up a Little Higher." Eight of her records sold more than a million copies each. She was a favorite of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and at his request sang to an audience of two hundred thousand people immediately before his "I Have a Dream" speech in August of 1963. She won a Lifetime Achievement Grammy, was introduced into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and was honored with a stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 1998.

The excerpt her comes form her 1966 book, Movin' On Up, written with Evan McLeod Wylie.

-- Mary Ford-Grabowsky

I say this out of my heart -- a song must do something for me as well as for the people that hear it. I can't sing a song that doesn't have a message. If it doesn't have the strength it can't lift you. I just can't seem to get the sense of it....

I know now that a great influence in my life was the Sanctified or Holiness Churches we had in the South. I was always a Baptist, but there was a Sanctified Church right next door to our house in New Orleans.

These people had no choir and no organ. They used the drum, the cymbal, the tambourine, and the steel triangle. Everybody in there sang and they clapped and stomped their feet and sang with their whole bodies. They had a beat, a powerful beat, a rhythm we held on to from slavery days, and their music was so strong and expressive it used to bring tears to my eyes.

I believe the blues and jazz and even the rock and roll stuff got their beat from the Sanctified Church. We Baptists sang sweet, and we had the long and short meter on beautiful songs like "Amazing Grace, How Sweet It Sounds," but when those Holiness people tore into "I'm So Glad Jesus Lifted Me Up!" they came out with real jubilation....

Once at church one of the preachers got up in the pulpit and spoke out against me. I got right up, too. I told him I was born to sing gospel music. Nobody had to teach me. I was serving God. I told him that I had been reading the Bible every day most of my life and there was a Psalm that said: "Oh clap your hands, all ye people! Shout unto the Lord with the voice of a trumpet!" If it was undignified, it was what the Bible told me to do.

Additional reading:
Sacred Voices: Essential Women's Wisdom Through the Ages, edited by Mary Ford-Grabowsky
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002).

Reprinted here with the kind permission of Mary Ford-Grabowsky.