Mahalia Jackson BioPic On Lifetime Offers Insight, Resurrection
Precisely because the current generation of Americans barely recognize the seismic impact of her overarching, protean talent, her name is seldom mentioned as being among those artists who definitively and powerfully shaped the parameters of spiritual life in our nation. So, when the name of Mahalia Jackson is evoked either in conversation or during the course of comparisons about whose contributions to high culture is worthy of valued designation, listeners are likely befuddled or made inquisitive: Asking who was Mahalia Jackson? And then they query, what discrete demands did she impose upon the our aesthetic sensibilities?
Mahalia Jackson gave Black religious music the unmistakable verve it had never possessed, managing — through the power of her vocal stylings and force of personality — to reconfigure the expansive territory of sacred music. When she sang black religious staples such as God Is Real, There is a Balm in Gilead or Move On Up A Little Higher, Jackson created signal ephemeral occasions unheard until her debut.
Her vocation as a professional gospel singer spanned only two decades during the 1950s and 1960s where she rocketed into international fame. Over the course of those years her contrato voice and public presentation — whether offered within the cloistered and sanctified confines of the Black…
