Mahalia Jackson: Excerpts from "Movin' on Up" (1968)

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.

It's been that way ever since I started singing and I guess I was singing almost as soon as I was walking and talking. I always had a big voice even as a child, and I was raised with music all around me.

New Orleans was full of music when I was born and all the time I was growing up there. It was the time when they had all the brass bands. There was still music on the showboats on the Mississippi River and there were all the cabarets and cafes where musicians like Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver were playing Ragtime music and jazz and the blues were being played all over.

Everybody was buying phonographs -- the kind you wound up on the side by hand -- just the way people have television sets today -- and everybody had records of all the Negro blues singers -- Bessie Smith... Ma Rainey... Mamie Smith... all the rest.

The famous white singers like Caruso -- you might hear them when you went by a white folks' house, but in a colored house you heard blues. You couldn't help but hear blues -- all through the thin partitions of the houses -- through the open windows -- up and down the street in the colored neighborhoods -- everybody played it real loud.

I saw lots of the famous New Orleans brass bands when I was growing up. They advertised the fish fries and the house-rent parties and played for the secret order lodge dances and funerals. When there was going to be a big fish fry or lodge dance they would fill a wagon up with a load of hay or they'd put some chairs in it. The brass band -- some of them were five pieces -- would climb up in that wagon and they would drive around town, stopping and playing at every street corner to drum up a crowd.

Everybody who possibly could would go that night to the fry or the lodge party. They would put sawdust down in the yard and string up lots of those pretty-colored Japanese lanterns and have eats on the inside and dancing on the outside. Those parties were the only social diversions Negroes had except for the church. No decent Negro -- no churchgoing Negro, at least -- would be caught dead down in Storyville where all the saloons and sportin' houses used to be.

They had the brass bands for the funerals -- when a very popular man or a secret lodge man or a sportin' man died. They never had a band behind a minister or an unimportant man.

But people today are mixed up about the brass bands. They didn't play jazz at the funerals. The band would play as solemn as a choir or a big pipe organ -- right out in front of the church where the funeral service was being held. Then they would march behind the hearse -- all the way to the cemetery. They didn't play jazz on the way either -- that's the bunk. After the family had left and the man was buried, then on the way back they would jazz it up. The musicians had been paid so they would play coming back from the cemetery, full of spirit -- blow it out free of charge -- and the folks along the way would have a good time. That's the way a funeral band really was.

I liked it and approved it. The Scripture says: "Rejoice at the outgoing." So why not have bands for funerals?...

Aunt Duke stood for so little play at home that I used to spend all my spare time at the Baptist church. If you helped scrub it out, they might let you ring the bell for the early-morning service. On Saturday nights they showed silent movies in the church community hall. There were services there every evening and in those days people thought as much of the evening prayer service as they did of the Sunday service so there was always lots going on for children to watch. Sinners who sat in the back would come forward to be prayed over by the preacher and be saved. On Baptism Sundays the women, all dressed in white, would lead the way out the door and across the street to the levee singing "Let's Go Down to the River Jordan," and the preacher would hold the services right down in the Mississippi, blessing the water and baptizing the congregation.

In those days, once you were baptized, you were looked after properly by the church. You were under the eye of the missionaries of the church, who kept track of whether you attended church and prayer meeting and led a Christian life. The churches of today have gotten away from this. They accept you on your word that you believe in the Lord and they don't see you again until the next Sunday. Today they are not doing the job they should to help people keep the faith. There's bad in all of us and most of us can't save ourselves without help.

I loved best to sing in the congregation of our church -- the Mount Moriah Baptist Church. All around me I could hear the foot-tapping and hand-clapping. That gave me bounce. I liked it much better than being up in the choir singing the anthem. I liked to sing the songs which testify to the glory of the Lord -- those anthems are too dead and cold for me. As David said in the Bible -- "Make a joyous noise unto the Lord!" -- that's me.

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.

Those 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 the 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.

First you've got to get the rhythm until, through the music, you have the freedom to interpret it. Perhaps that's why white folks just never do clap in time with my music the right way. I tell them, "Honey, I know you're enjoying yourself but please don't clap along with me."...

Many of the young colored people lost their way during Depression times in Chicago. The times were so hard that it broke their spirits. And although I didn't realize it at the time, I know now that the Lord must have had his arms around me in those days and he protected me. God moves in mysterious ways -- and in a mysterious way, the Depression became responsible for my whole career in gospel singing.

It came about because at the Greater Salem Baptist Church the Johnson boys had formed a little singing and entertainment group. There were the three brothers, Prince, Robert and Wilbur, a girl named Louise Barry, and myself.

Robert Johnson was only eighteen years old, but he was a spirited young man. He was like Sammy Davis, Jr. -- just full of pep and energy all the time. He loved to sing and act. He was good at writing skits and directing them, and he had us putting on little plays for the church socials. One was called Hellbound; another was From Earth to Glory and another was The Fatal Wedding. He would play the husband and I would play the wife and the others would play old folks and young folks. We cut up and had wonderful times and everybody enjoyed watching us.

After a while we also formed a little singing group and Prince Johnson worked out our arrangements on the piano. He had his own style of playing and it seemed to suit us just right. We called ourselves the Johnson Gospel Singers. With Prince at the piano, we had a bounce that made us popular from the start.

We improved on the music and strayed from the score and gave our own way to each song. Looking back, I'd say that Prince really was the first gospel piano player in Chicago and we were really the first Negro gospel group in the city.

At first we only sang for our church people, but then we began to get asked around. People who heard about us would come and invite us to sing at their church and then pass us along to another church in another part of the South Side.

The reason was that all over the South Side churches were struggling desperately to keep their doors open. All during the boom days of the twenties, colored people had been buying white people's churches and synagogues. They bought them with big mortgages, but in those good times there was plenty of money to meet the notes. The Depression had stopped the flow of money and the congregations couldn't meet their mortgages and pay for the coal to heat their churches and the electricity to light them. They passed the plate over and over again at the services, but people had so little that the churches began to try to raise a little bit of extra money with suppers and socials....

I had met Professor [Thomas] A. Dorsey, the great writer of gospel songs -- he is to gospel music what W.C. Handy is to the blues -- and we used to travel together to the same church meetings and conventions.

A lot of folks don't know that gospel songs have not been handed down like spirituals. Most gospel songs have been composed and written by Negro musicians like Professor Dorsey. Before he got saved by the Lord and went into the church, Professor Dorsey was a piano player for Ma Rainey, one of the first of the blues singers. His nickname in those days was "Georgia Tom" and everybody who went to the tent shows used to know him for the rocking, syncopated beat he had on his piano.

When he began to write gospel music he still had a happy beat in his songs. They're sung by thousands of people like myself who believe religion is a joy.

There are still some Negro churches that don't have gospel singers or choirs and only sing the old hymns and anthems, but among Baptists and the Methodists and the Sanctified church people you will always hear gospel music.

Professor Dorsey would have copies of his wonderful songs like "Precious Lord" and "Peace in the Valley" along with him when we traveled together and he would sell these for ten cents a piece to the folks who wanted to own them. Sometimes he would sell five thousand copies a day. But I was still what you call a "fish and bread" singer in those days. I was still singing for my supper as well as for the Lord.

The more gospel singing took hold in Chicago and around the country, the more some of the colored ministers objected to it. They were cold to it. They didn't like the hand-clapping and the stomping and they said we were bringing jazz into the church and it wasn't dignified. 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.

The European hymns they wanted me to sing are beautiful songs, but they're not Negro music....

The Negroes' new fight for rights had come to a new focus down in the heart of the "Black Belt" in Albany, Georgia, where the colored people have never been granted their rights, including the right to vote. Two weeks before Christmas [1962], 737 colored people led by Dr. W.G. Anderson, a Negro doctor from Albany, and the Reverend King, marched together in downtown Albany. They held a meeting and prayed for the white people to please see the light and let them have their rights.

In that great Christmas congregation there were young people, old women in their seventies, working men, doctors, lawyers and housekeepers. They were all arrested and put in jail.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy were convicted of leading the demonstration and went to jail. Later, Reverend King and nine other Negroes were jailed again when they prayed on the steps of the City Hall, but the Albany Movement only grew stronger.

The Negroes began letting the white people know their feelings by not going into the city's downtown stores, and the boycott emptied the streets of shoppers.

Once again it was in the churches that the colored people rallied for their cause. The white people oppressed them and threatened them, but the Negroes would swing into hymns like "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder" and "Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour" and the song that got famous during the student sit-ins -- "We Shall Overcome."

It has meant so much to me that a great part of the brave fight for freedom down South now is coming from inside the church and from the hymns and gospel songs the people are singing.

The "Freedom Songs" began back during the Montgomery boycott when the Negroes began singing in the churches to keep up their courage. When the students began to go to jail during the sit-ins they began to make up new words to the spirituals and hymns and old gospel melodies that the Negroes had been singing in their churches for generations. Some got printed, some got put on records and some just got passed around.

Using songs as a way of expressing protest and gaining strength and hope runs way back deep in the American Negro's past. When the colored slaves on the plantations sang, "Steal away to Jesus, I ain't got long to stay here," they weren't talking just about Heaven; they were expressing their secret hope that they, too, would have their chance to escape up North to freedom....

The soul of the Negro just naturally has so much rhythm and music in it that "testifying" to music in church and "getting happy" with singing has always been a way in which the Negro has sought to renew his strength.

Now all through the South the Negroes are singing. They sang while they were put in jail by the hundreds and sometimes the power of their music was so great that the white guards began singing right along with them.

They sing in churches and in mass meetings while deputies and sheriffs go around taking names and white gangs burn up their cars.

The big song of the movement that is now sung in the South by thousands of Negroes almost every night is "We Shall Overcome."...

The "Freedom Songs" have caught on because music speaks a language to individual souls that cannot always be expressed by the spoken word. There's something about music that is so penetrating that your soul gets the message. No matter what trouble comes to a person, music can help him face it. Some who didn't believe in God have found him through music.

Many colored people in the South have been kept down so hard that they have had little schooling. They can't handle a lot of reading, but as one preacher said, "The singing has drawn them together. Through the songs they have expressed years of suppressed hopes, suffering and even joy and love."

One young Negro leader said, "Without music there could have been no Albany Movement."

And Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "The Freedom Songs are giving people new courage, a radiant hope in the future in our most trying hours."...

There are still some people who will try to tell you that gospel singing is a fad and that it will fade away. Don't you believe it!

Gospel music is nothing but singing of good tidings -- spreading the good news. It will last as long as any music because it is sung straight from the human heart. Join with me sometime -- whether you're white or colored -- and you will feel it for yourself. Its future is brighter than a daisy.