Mahalia Jackson

Mahalia Jackson, the great American Negro woman singer of spiritual, blues and folk songs has said that "although a stateless man is but a dumb one, an individual having no music in his soul is still dumber". She is one of my favourite singers.

Born in 1911, in New Orleans, as a "waterside worker's" daughter, Mahalia Jackson was almost as young as jazz itself. One can understand her astounding career as a singer only if he takes into account the general musical background in her native town. There, during her childhood, the music still in fashion of late, was rapidly "swept" by the novel devices of a new century, with almost "crazy" syncopation and rhythmic patterns. New Orleans was to become the "cradle" of the American Negroes' new music, which in its turn was to grow afterwards into a world-known musical "language".

She was but a little girl of five when she became a member of the chorus organized and instructed by her father. One can thus easily become aware of the fact that this way Mahalia' s ebony body was, from the very first, ''thrilled'' with the rhythmic patterns in the Negroes' songs and dances: they offered her sensible soul and heart the boundless innate specific solemn feelings hidden in them.

Those who love the true jazz at will be thus shown with Mahalia Jackson help, a whole musical universe of the song, whose main fulcrum is to be found in the deepness of the human soul and its ever going on striving for purity.

Cãtãlina Stoica
"D. Zamfirescu" School, Focsani, Romania
Teacher: Petru Dumitru <petrudumitru@netscape.net>