Download or read book Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field written by Mark Burford and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly a half century after her death in 1972, Mahalia Jackson remains the most esteemed figure in black gospel music history. Born in the backstreets of New Orleans in 1911, Jackson during the Great Depression joined the Great Migration to Chicago, where she became an highly regarded church singer and, by the mid-fifties, a coveted recording artist for Apollo and Columbia Records, lauded as the "World's Greatest Gospel Singer." This "Louisiana Cinderella" narrative of Jackson's career during the decade following World War II carried important meanings for African Americans, though it remains a story half told. Jackson was gospel's first multi-mediated artist, with a nationally broadcast radio program, a Chicago-based television show, and early recordings that introduced straight-out-of-the-church black gospel to American and European audiences while also tapping the vogue for religious pop in the early Cold War. In some ways, Jackson's successes made her an exceptional case, though she is perhaps best understood as part of broader developments in the black gospel field. Built upon foundations laid by pioneering Chicago organizers in the 1930s, black gospel singing, with Jackson as its most visible representative, began to circulate in novel ways as a form of popular culture in the 1940s and 1950s, its practitioners accruing prestige not only through devout integrity but also from their charismatic artistry, public recognition, and pop-cultural cachet. These years also saw shifting strategies in the black freedom struggle that gave new cultural-political significance to African American vernacular culture. The first book on Jackson in 25 years, Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field draws on a trove of previously unexamined archival sources that illuminate Jackson's childhood in New Orleans and her negotiation of parallel careers as a singing Baptist evangelist and a mass media entertainer, documenting the unfolding material and symbolic influence of Jackson and black gospel music in postwar American society.
Download or read book The Mahalia Jackson Reader written by Mark Burford and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""African American gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was just sixty years old when her heart finally gave out on January 27, 1972, as she lay alone in her sick bed at Little Company of Mary Hospital just south of Chicago. Obituaries faithfully recounted the best-known story lines of her unlikely career: how the power of her voice was rooted in her devout Baptist upbringing; her birth in 1911 and rise from dire poverty in Uptown New Orleans to international celebrity; a dedication to the black freedom struggle that further elevated her to the status of cultural and political symbol. Together, Jackson's voice, faith, prestige, and activism, made her at the time of her death, in the assessment of her friend Harry Belafonte, "the single most powerful black woman in the United States." Yet her reputation is also complex. Invoking the charisma of Martin and Malcolm, the persuasion of statesmen and despots, and the splendor of divas and diadems, Maceo Bowie's letter to the editor of the Chicago Defender seems to both celebrate and grapple with the substance of Jackson dynamism as a gospel singer and her consequence as an illustrious black public figure. In an editorial in the Defender following Jackson's death, E. Duke McNeil acknowledged Jackson's habitual acclaim as the "Queen of the gospel singers," while also observing: "You can almost say that Mahalia was the 'greatest' because she was the only gospel singer known everywhere." Indeed, for scholars of black gospel, the music itself is often hidden in plain sight. On the one hand, gospel voices are inescapable, audible not just within the music industry, where they have become a lingua franca for pop singers, but also in recurring representations of the black church, in the omnipresent sound of the black gospel choir, and in the personal histories of many black artists. On the other, in comparison with such genres as jazz, blues, country music, and hip hop, documentation of black gospel music, which has thrived in in-group settings, is relatively scant, leaving researchers with limited sources and largely reliant on oral history. Fortunately, the scope and coverage of Jackson's caereer produced a paper trail that enables us to study her personal and professional life while gaining insight into the black gospel field of which she was such an integral part. In compiling a wide swath of these sources on Jackson, The Mahalia Jackson Reader seeks to paint a fuller and more vivid picture of one of the most resonant musical figures of the second half of the twentieth century. This volume offers a wealth of biographical detail about Jackson, though it also reveals that Jackson was many things to many people. This is reflected in the book's organization by topic and type of writing, though, as often as possible, Jackson's own voice joins the dialogue, offering her side of the story. Jackson always identified as a child of New Orleans and the documents in Part I convey her recognition of the singularity of that city and of her legacy as the grandaughter of enslaved and emancipated African Americans. Stories about Jackson's upbringing are recounted by the esteemed critics and commentators in Part II, though these writers also ruminate upon the essence of her artistry, her relationship to jazz, her significance as an African American woman in the public eye, and the ways in which she became an increasingly complicated crossover figure as her visibility grew beyond the bounds of the black church. Newspaper coverage in Part III offers "hot takes" on Jackson's appearances, the pop-cultural cachet of postwar gospel singing, and the singer's transatlantic reception. Already in the 1950s, though even more in subsequent decades, it is evident that beyond being an exemplar of gospel singing, Jackson was read through various investments in the sociopolitical significance of black expressive culture. In 1931, Jackson moved from New Orleans to Chicago where she became immediately immersed in a burgeoning modern gospel movement. The testimony of Jackson and her associates in Part IV are more personal and allow us to understand her less as an exceptional individual than as a musical colleague and as a member of a black South Side community. Yet another perspective on Jackson emerges from the writing directed toward a scholarly audience in Part V, which seeks to contextualize the singer historically and offer enterprising interpretive claims"--
Download or read book Mahalia Jackson written by Barbara Kramer and published by Enslow Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the renowned gospel singer who hoped that her art would further the cause of civil rights for African Americans.
Download or read book People Get Ready written by Bob Darden and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Africa through the spirituals, from minstrel music through jubilee, and from traditional to contemporary gospel, "People Get Ready!" provides, for the first time, an accessible overview of this musical genre.
Download or read book A City Called Heaven written by Robert M. Marovich and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A City Called Heaven, Robert M. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through its growth into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines print media, ephemera, and hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians--as well as relatives and friends of gospel pioneers--to recover forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, the music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. Yet it also helped give voice to a people--and lift a nation. A City Called Heaven celebrates a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.
Download or read book Is It a Sermon written by Donyelle C. McCray and published by Presbyterian Publishing Corp. This book was released on 2024-10-08 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is It a Sermon? is an informative and daring call to blur the boundaries of the sermon genre, exploring the “shoreline” of homiletics, or the place where preaching laps up against other modes of discourse. In this book, Donyelle McCray explores how preaching merges with prayer, song, performance, and activism—the gospel dancing in and out of the forms we create for it. Consider the sermonic performance of Isaiah walking naked and barefoot for three years, the deaconess whose morning prayer rhythmically flows into sermon, or the gospel soloist who pauses in her song to tell a story or break into a sermonette. McCray is interested in the possibilities that emerge when we play at the shoreline, and she questions what modes of preaching get overlooked due to genre classifications. She seeks to discover what we might learn from these shoreline preachers about bearing witness, enacting Scripture, and listening to life. While these questions could be explored generally, McCray focuses on African American preachers who play at the boundaries of the sermon genre, with attention to how genre fluidity provides a means of drawing on ancestral wisdom. Key figures like Mahalia Jackson, Harriet Powers, Rosie Lee Tomkins, Thea Bowman, Howard Thurman, and Toni Morrison are examined as artists, activists, and proclaimers. She shines a new light on their work and points out how they reform preacherly identities and refuse traditional patterns of holding authority. Ultimately, in blurring the boundaries of sermon genre, this book offers readers strategies for embracing their voices more fully within and beyond the pulpit.
Download or read book Black Resonance written by Emily J. Lordi and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Bessie Smith’s powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women’s singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith’s blues and Richard Wright’s neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers. The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century’s most beloved and challenging voices.
Download or read book The Black Church written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.
Download or read book Bright Star of the West written by Sean Williams and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bright Star of the West examines the life, repertoire, and influence of Ireland's greatest sean-nos (old-style) singer, Joe Heaney (1919-1984). Best known for popularing this form of Gaelic a cappella folk song in the United States, authors Sean Williams and Lillis ? Laoire reveal the ways in which Heaney's life story demonstrates the intertwining of music with political memory and cultural understanding.
Download or read book On Rhetoric and Black Music written by Earl H. Brooks and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Black musicians and composers used their craft to define and influence public discourse. This groundbreaking work examines how Black music functions as rhetoric, considering its subject not merely reflective of but central to African American public discourse. Author, musician, and scholar Earl H. Brooks argues that there would have been no Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, or Black Arts Movement as we know these phenomena without Black music. Through rhetorical studies, archival research, and musical analysis, Brooks establishes the "sonic lexicon of Black music," defined by a distinct constellation of sonic and auditory features that bridge cultural, linguistic, and political spheres with music. Genres of Black music such as blues and jazz are discursive fields, where swinging, improvisation, call-and-response, blue notes, and other musical idioms serve as rhetorical tools to articulate the feelings, emotions, and states of mind that have shaped African American cultural and political development. Examining the resounding artistry of iconic musicians such as Scott Joplin, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Mahalia Jackson, this work offers an alternative register in which these musicians and composers are heard as public intellectuals, consciously invested in crafting rhetorical projects they knew would influence the public sphere.
Download or read book The Mahalia Jackson Reader written by Mark Burford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in New Orleans before migrating to Chicago, Mahalia Jackson (1911-72) is undoubtedly the most widely known black gospel singer, having achieved fame among African American communities in the 1940s then finding a wide audience among non-black U.S. and international audiences after she signed with major label Columbia Records in 1954. The newest entry in OUP's celebrated Readers on American Musicians series,ÂThe Mahalia Jackson ReaderÂplaces Jackson's musical performances and their reception against key changes in 20th-century America, changes that include transformations of the recorded music industry, the increasing visibility of the civil rights movement, a florescence of Cold War-era religiosity, and an explosion of popularity of black gospel music itself. Jackson's career combines parallel tracks as a black church singer and as a national pop celebrity, and makes her one of the most complex and important black artists of the postwar decades. Gospel is a particularly challenging genre to study because of the paucity of sources. BecauseÂof Jackson's celebrity, there is more substantial coverage of her life and work than other gospel artists, but Jackson scholarship is still largely dependent on trade biographies from the 1970s for source material. For this reader, Mark Burford has gone beyond the standard biographies and has drawn from extensive archival research, including in the volume interview transcripts and the largely-untouched papers of Jackson's associate Bill Russell, who kept a journal tracking Jackson's activities from 1951 to 1955. The new sources - in particular Russell's notes - uniquely enable an assessment of the reciprocal relationship between the two careers Jackson pursued, essentially simultaneously: as an in-demand church singer in Chicago, and as a media star for a major network and recording label.
Download or read book Mahalia Jackson written by Charles K. Wolfe and published by Chelsea House Publications. This book was released on 1990 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the renowned gospel singer who hoped, through her art, to break down some of the barriers between black and white people.
Download or read book Just Mahalia Baby written by Laurraine Goreau and published by Pelican Publishing. This book was released on 1975 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is "the real book" of the incredible Mahalia Jackson, as pledged to her by her close friend, Laurraine Goreau, before her death. Rich in poetic condensation and vivid imagery, it reaches back to recreate an era and a way of life that no longer exist; it surfaces hidden folk lore and cultural patterns; it delves into Voodoo and a secret psychic world. It shows you jazz at its roots when it was "jass", the Devil's temptation; first-hand, it gives you the surprising sociological significances of the whole gospel movement ... but most of all, it takes you with a misshapen mote on a forgotten scrap of river-land as Mahalia pushes, fights, sings her way to a personage of unique stature among Americans to th eworld's peoples, revered by hundreds of thousands as a symbol of utter integrity, the bearer of God's tidings.
Download or read book The Sound of Light written by Don Cusic and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don Cusic presents gospel music as part of the history of contemporary Christianity. From the psalms of the early Puritans through the hymns of Isaac Watts and the social activism of the Wesleys, gospel music was established in eighteenth-century America. With the camp meetings songs of the Kentucky Revival and the spirituals and hymns that stemmed from the Civil War and beyond, gospel music grew through the nineteenth century and expanded through new technologies in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Handbook of Gospel Music written by C. Charles Clency and published by Booklocker.com. This book was released on 2021-08-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook traces the evolution of gospel music and related economic factors. Included are persons with notable contributions to the art form. Strategies are given that may help the success of aspiring directors and instrumentalists.
Download or read book Soul on Soul written by Tammy L. Kernodle and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First time in paperback and e-book! The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in—and stretching beyond—a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Her late-in-life flowering of faith saw her embrace a spiritual jazz oriented toward advancing the civil rights struggle and helping wounded souls. Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages. In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history.
Download or read book Say It written by Eric C Redmond and published by Moody Publishers. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Say It! A Celebration of Expository Preaching in the African American Tradition argues that Biblical Exposition is most dynamic when coupled with the African American preaching tradition. Charlie Dates, Romell Williams, George Parks, Jr., Terry D. Streeter and a cast of pastors and preaching professors collaborate to demonstrate the power of exposition in the cradle of the Black pulpit. The contributors in this volume give examples of African American Biblical exposition in every section of the Old Testament and New Testament. They also explain how to preach from narrative, poetical, prophetic, epistolary, and apocalyptic genres throughout the Scriptures. This important and powerful resource celebrates the faithful, biblical preaching of African Americans that is so often overlooked because it's stylistically different than the style of most white preachers. Appropriate for training associate ministers or use as a textbook in homiletics, Say It! will give the preacher what is needed to speak to real life from every page of the Book!
