Jackson was brought up in a strict religious atmosphere. Her father’s family included several entertainers, but she was forced to confine her own musical activities to singing in the church choir and listening—surreptitiously—to recordings of Bessie Smith and Ida Cox as well as of Enrico Caruso. When she was 16 she went to Chicago and joined the Greater Salem Baptist Church choir, where her remarkable contralto voice soon led to her selection as a soloist.
Jackson first came to wide public attention in the 1930s, when she participated in a cross-country gospel tour singing such songs as “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and “I Can Put My Trust in Jesus.” In 1934 her first recording, “God Gonna Separate the Wheat from the Tares,” was a success, leading to a series of other recordings. Jackson’s first great hit, “Move on Up a Little Higher,” appeared in 1945; it was especially important for its use of the “vamp,” an indefinitely repeated phrase (or chord pattern) that provides a foundation for solo improvisation.
All the songs with which she was identified—including “I Believe,” “Just over the Hill,” “When I Wake Up in Glory,” and “Just a Little While to Stay Here”—were gospel songs, with texts drawn from biblical themes and strongly influenced by the harmonies, rhythms, and emotional force of blues. Jackson refused to sing any but religious songs or indeed to sing at all in surroundings that she considered inappropriate. But she sang on the radio and on television and, starting in 1950, performed to overflow audiences in annual concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Eight of Jackson’s records sold more than a million copies each.
Jackson was enormously popular abroad; her version of “Silent Night,” for example, was one of the all-time bestselling records in Denmark. She made a notable appearance at the Newport (Rhode Island) Jazz Festival in 1957—in a program devoted entirely, at her request, to gospel songs— and she sang at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in January 1961. In the 1950s and ’60s she was active in the civil rights movement; in 1963 she sang the old African American spiritual “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned” for a crowd of more than 200,000 in Washington, D.C., just before Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Bill Monroe
