Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 21

Record label: Phillips

Produced: Cal Lampley

Recorded: Newport Jazz Festival; July 6, 1958

Released: November 1958

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Mahalia Jackson (v); Mildred Falls (p); Lilton Mitchell (o); Tom Bryant (b)

Track listing: Introduction; An Evening Prayer; A City Called Heaven; It Don’t Cost Very Much; He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands; The Lord’s Prayer

Running time: 17.19

Current CD: Sony SNY536292 adds: I’m On My Way; Didn’t It Rain; When The Saints Go Marching In; I’m Goin’ To Live The Life I Sing About In My Song; Keep Your Hand On The Plow; Walk Over God’s Heaven; Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho; Jesus Met The Woman At The Well; His Eye Is On The Sparrow

Further listening: Home in on the classic Columbia years with Mahalia Jackson’s Greatest Hits (1988)

Further reading: Just Mahalia, Baby (Laurrain Goreau, 1984); www.geocities.com/bourbonstreet/2675/ (fan site)

Download: iTunes

It’s said that when Mahalia Jackson began singing the jaunty spiritual Didn’t It Rain during her Sunday morning slot at the ’58 Newport Jazz Festival, the soft summer drizzle suddenly stopped. We know from Mahalia’s stage patter that it was actually still raining at the end of the concert, but it’s testament to the truly unique spirit of her music that folks should insist some divine intervention took place. As her friend the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr commented, a voice like hers came only ‘once in a millennium’.

By 1958, Mahalia – then aged 46 – was a household name in America, following a string of crossover hits and a sensational performance on the Ed Sullivan Show two years earlier. Though she had made some recordings with Duke Ellington, she famously refused to sing pop or the blues, preferring to spread the word of the Lord through her beloved hymns and gospel music. She was far from a gospel ‘snob’, however; when musicologists from the Juilliard quizzed her about her extraordinary vocal technique in 1950, they discovered a woman who’d grown up listening to Enrico Caruso and blues queen Bessie Smith, as well as the maudlin jazz of New Orleans funeral marches and the religious music she heard in her father’s church.

At 16, Mahalia, with $100 sewn into her underclothes, left the segregation and relentless poverty of New Orleans for the northern mecca of Chicago, where she’d heard that blacks and whites could sit together on the buses. Quickly recognised in her new church as an incredible talent, she was whisked away on gospel tours and to recording sessions, ever imploring the people around her to ‘make a joyful noise unto the Lord’ and revel in the transcendental joy of religious singing. She also qualified as a beautician.

At Newport, Mahalia gave one of her finest ever performances, the rich, stirring rendition of An Evening Prayer kicking off a set of 19th century church music and ‘modern’ gospel innovations, all given a swinging jazz flavour by the backing of long-term accomplice Mildred Falls’ piano, Lilton Mitchell’s organ and Tom Bryant’s bass. (In 1946, Mahalia had been one of the first gospel artists to use a Hammond organ on her records.) Three tracks – It Don’t Cost Very Much, I’m Going To Live The Life I Sing About In My Song and Walk Over God’s Heaven – were written by her favourite gospel composer, Thomas A. Dorsey, and her familiarity and identification with the material is clear in her mesmerising interpretations.

‘I sing God’s music because it makes me feel free,’ she once said. ‘It gives me hope. With the blues, when you finish, you still have the blues.’