THE GOSPEL QUEEN AND THE EMPRESS OF THE BLUES:

Mahalia Jackson and Bessie Smith

by

Lancaster Hughes

It has been said that if Mahalia Jackson sang blues she would sound like Bessie Smith, and if Bessie Smith had ever sung gospel songs, she would have sounded like Mahalia Jackson Certainly gospel songs, except for the religious words, are not unlike blues, and there is indeed a similarity between the singing styles of the late great Bessie and the very much alive Miss Jackson — and not without reason. Mahalia Jackson grew up on Bessie Smith records, though she was a daughter of the church. Both are monarchs of deep voiced, moving, rhythmical song — and both knew a man named Thomas A. Dorsey who went from the show world into the church. Mahalia Jackson sings Dorsey's gospel songs. Bessie Smith heard Dorsey's blues.

Among Negro musicians in the field of popular music today there seems to be a tendency to employ terms of royalty as a part of their names: King Cole, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lord Invader, Sir Charles Thompson, Princess Stewart, also Lady Day. Mahalia Jackson is not known as Queen Mahalia, but she is called the "Queen of Gospel Singers," just as Bessie Smith was called the "Empress of the Blues." As a child in New Orleans Mahalia Jackson heard many

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of the early Bessie Smith records, liked them, and, in a religious rather than a worldly way, developed as she grew older a singing style like that of Bessie Smith's records. Bessie Smith had a strong, rich, deep contralto voice. So has Mahalia Jackson. Bessie Smith had an intonation feeling for rhythms. Miss Jackson has, too. Bessie Smith's voice slurred and slid and curved from one note to another in a way that made it impossible to put down in musical notation exactly what she was singing in a blues. So curves and slides Mahalia Jackson's voice when she is singing a church song. But of the blues Mahalia Jackson says, "Anybody that sings the blues is in a deep pit yelling for help." Of her own gospel singing she has stated, "I try to give it the way I feel, and most of the time I feel good." She explains her way of projecting a song as simply "accelerating the beat of the music, and putting joy into the voice. Sort of 'making a joyful noise unto the Lord,' as David said." Or as the old Fisk Jubilee Singers did when they sang their jubilees.

But gospel songs are not spirituals. They should not be confused with folk songs at all. The spirituals were created by a great body of unknown singers, as is all true folk music. Gospel songs are modern composed songs, most of them written by living men and women since 1925. They originated with Negro writers and Negro singers in Negro churches. Thomas A. Dorsey, now of the Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago, is the leading gospel song writer, composer and former publisher of such well known tunes of that genre as the widely sung, Precious Lord, Take My Hand, We Will Meet Him in the Sweet By and By, and Someday, Somewhere.

Other gospel writers are Roberta Martin, Theodore Frye, Jobe Huntley

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and Clara Ward.

Before he got religion and went into the church, Dorsey was a piano player for one of the first of the famous blues singers, Ma Rainey. He composed one of her most popular songs, *The Stormy Sea Blues*. And for Tampa Red, he wrote *Tight Like that*. At that time his nickname was Georgia Tom, and he was known far and wide to tent show and theatre audiences as a player of joyous, rocking, foot-patting piano music. This happy quality, Dorsey has carried over into the music of many of his church songs, and they are sung in thousands of congregations whose members believe that "religion is a joy." The more sedate Negro churches do not have gospel choirs, nor employ such music. They stick to the traditional hymns. Gospel songs are unknown in the Episcopal, Presbyterian, or Congregational churches. But among the masses of the Baptist, Methodist, and Sanctified sects they are widely used. Concerning these songs, the distinguished author, Arna Bontemps, has written an analysis called, *Rock, Church, Rock* in which he traces their development. Gospel songs are of such a nature that often literally churches do rock. But the composers and singers of gospel tunes, at least most of them, resent their music being confused with secular or sinful music, and have considered ways of preventing this at their annual Convention of Gospel Choirs. One excellent Negro gospel singer, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, has had for years, very successful engagements in theatres and night clubs —just as the white evangelist, Sister Aimee MacPherson, carried her songs and sermons into the Capitol Theatre on Broadway during the 1920s. But most gospel singers do not approve of this merging of the church and the entertainment fields. Mahalia Jackson has stated as her conviction, "The church will be here when the night clubs are gone." And she has turned down very lucrative offers to sing in places of amusement.

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Once on a cold winter night in Chicago I went to hear Miss Jackson give a program of her religious songs in a small South Side church before she became nationally known. It was a cold audience and, due to the weather, a small one. But Mahalia warmed the church with the intensity of her singing. When the program was over a poor little woman came up to her and said that her mother was very ill and might never hear Mahalia Jackson sing again. She asked timidly if she would come home with her and sing just one song for her mother. Through the biting cold at midnight Mahalia Jackson trudged. Then up a dimly lit flight of stairs to a poor apartment where the sick woman lay. There she sang not one song, but several, and prayed with the woman before she went home.

It is said that when Mahalia Jackson was contracted in 1954 to appear on a series of transcontinental radio programs for the Columbia Broadcasting System, her newly acquired managers suggested that perhaps she might arrange during the series, for the sake of variety, a few light non-religious programs. Her answer was, "I can't let CBS dominate the Lord." And, although Miss Jackson did sing some songs that were not formerly a part of her church programs, such as the folk air, *Danny Boy*, and a thrilling rendition of *The Battle Hymn of the Republic*, she refused to do any number of a crashly worldly nature or purely for the sake of entertainment.

In the New Orleans of Mahalia Jackson's childhood — she was born in 1911 — it would have been impossible not to hear jazz or blues for which that city is famous. And on a sensitive child with a musical ear, such music was bound to make an impression.

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But Mahalia grew up singing in a church choir. And her father, who was a dockworker by day and a barber by night, on Sundays became a preacher in a small church. In her early teens Mahalia was already singing "the Lord's songs," as she terms them, so beautifully that the little church was crowded with people who loved to hear her. At sixteen she migrated to Chicago, intending to study beauty culture, or else become a nurse, she was not quite sure which. Meanwhile she took jobs in domestic service to earn a living. The first week in the North, she joined the church and went to choir rehearsal. In the familiar old Baptist hymns, her deep strong voice soared above all the others. She became a soloist with the choir. And soon the director had formed a quintet of gospel singers around her which was quickly in demand for appearances at revivals and programs in other churches.

For many years Mahalia Jackson was widely known in the large and small Negro churches of Chicago as a stirring singer of their songs. As the popularity of gospel music began to spread in colored church circles all over the country, requests for her services began to come to Miss Jackson from congregations in other cities. She travelled a great deal, singing. Then in 1945 she made a record called *Move On Up A Little Higher* which overnight became a phenomenal best seller — and almost entirely to Negro buyers. Eventually this record sold over a million copies. Its slow syncopated rhythms caught the fancy of jazz fans too, who brought it, not for religious reasons, but as a fine example of a new kind of rhythmical Negro singing. The gospel song began to reach a public for whom it was not intended at all, and its vogue has been mounting ever since.

When her records were released in Europe, publications there

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devoted to popular music immediately hailed Mahalia Jackson as a
great new American artist. These comments drifted back to America,
and booking agents and radio executives began to inquire into just
who Mahalia Jackson was and where she might be contacted. The
spotlight of publicity began to center upon her. From the churches
to larger auditoriums she moved with her modern religious songs.
In New York she gave a gospel concert at Carnegie Hall. It was sold
out. A second religious concert a year later was packed to the
doors and hundreds of people turned away. Then she went to Europe.
One publication reports that a half hour after the advance ticket
sale began for her five concerts in Copenhagen, all the tickets were
sold for all the programs. She gave crowded concerts in England and
France, too. Then she treated herself to a trip to the Holy Land
and on Christmas Eve she sang *Silent Night*, *Holy Night*, in Bethlehem.

Mahalia Jackson can, if she chooses, buy a great many
things with the money that came from her singing. But she remains
in the same apartment where she has lived for many years in Chicago.
And she could not buy the kind of goodness, about which she never
boasts herself, which led her one cold winter night to walk through
the snow to sing for just one poor woman alone, whom she had never
seen before. From this quality within herself comes the powerful
intensity and deep conviction which Mahalia Jackson puts into so
simple a lyric as:

I'm so glad salvation is free!
So glad salvation is free!
Yes, salvation is free
For you and me!
I'm so glad salvation is free!

There is no written record of Bessie Smith ever having any

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connection with the church. And the only songs she is known to have
sung approximating a gospel song in sentiment are *Moan, You Moaners*
and *On Revival Day*, both with the Bessemer Singers. But once she
made a mighty sermon out of a number called, *P preaching the Blues*
with James P. Johnson at the piano. And the greatest of Bessie's
blues, like the *Backwater Blues* and *Nobody Knows You When You're
Down and Out* are as moving as any gospel songs. And the way Bessie
could hit you with a song made you remember it.

Bessie Smith had one of the most powerful singing voices in
the whole world. When Bessie Smith sang in a theatre, you could
sometimes hear her out in the street, and all up and down the street.
People did not always have to pay to go inside the auditorium to
listen. She was a large woman, almost six feet tall, very dark, with
a round pleasant face, and big arms that she carried slightly akimbo,
yet hanging down, at her sides. She sang blues. She is remembered
in the annals of folk music and jazz as the greatest of all blues
singers. During her lifetime she was called, "The Empress of the
Blues." A few years ago, Columbia Records issued a long playing
album of her blues, *The Bessie Smith Story*, containing forty-eight
of her songs, and new releases of her old records continue to come
out, now almost twenty years after Bessie Smith is gone. She died
tragically, and she was never so famous in her lifetime as she is
after death.

Just as Mahalia Jackson did for years, Bessie Smith sang
mostly for Negro audiences — — all of her life — — for when
Bessie was living, radio and Broadway hardly paid her the least
mind, and television was not in existence. Bessie did sing once
in a downtown New York night club. But most of the time she sang
in tents and little theatres and open air shows all over the South.

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She was a great favorite with the common people of color. She sang their songs, the blues. The blues are mostly very sad songs about being without love, without money, or without a home. And yet, almost always in the blues, there is some humorous twist of thought in words that make people laugh. They have a very definite lyric pattern, the blues, one long line which is repeated, then a third line to rhyme with the first two. Sometimes, but not often, instead of being repeated, the second line is omitted. The music is slow, often mournful, yet syncopated, with the kind of marching bass behind it that seems to say, "In spite of fate, bad luck, these blues themselves, I'm going on, on! I'm going to get there." One very beautiful old blues, *Trouble in Mind*, has the refrain, "The sun's gonna shine in my back door some day." That's the way the blues are, about trouble, yet looking for the sun.

Genuine blues are folk songs, anonymously created. Commercial writers have greatly distorted and vulgarized the blues — as they are in danger of doing with the gospel songs — and the term blues is now often used loosely to mean almost any type of loud jazzy popular Broadway song. But the true folk blues are very simple, direct and beautiful. Nobody knows who made up the first blues sixty or seventy or eighty, maybe a hundred years ago. The form seems to have gotten standardized in the late 1860s. But it was not until about 1910 that W. C. Handy in Memphis wrote down on music paper the words and notes of blues. The blues were then considered backwoods music, river music, bad people's music. Just as no one paid much attention to hillbilly music until recently, so one one except the singers and creators of blues themselves paid that music any attention. It sometimes takes a citizenry a long while to appreciate its folk heritage. But the blues have been in the hearts of the ordinary Negroes

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of the South for a long time. Gradually they began to creep into the
hearts of all America. The blue notedrifted up the Mississippi into
the heart of American music, became a standard note in jazz, and went
on into the serious compositions of George Gershwin and others. The
warm deep harsh slurring singing voice of the blues has been copied by
thousands of popular singers on the radio and in the theatre. In
1955 a vogue called "rhythm and blues" took possession of Tin Pan Alley,
as Broadway calls that section frequented by popular song writers. And
Helen Traubel of the Metropolitan Opera House has sung the St. Louis
Blues in a night club. If Bessie Smith were still alive and singing,
she would be a very rich woman. She never became really rich while she
was alive.

Bessie Smith was born into the world toward the end of the
nineteenth century in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The exact date of her
birth is unknown. Where she lived as a child and how she grew up is al-
most equally obscure. But somewhere along the line, the great old-time
blues singer, Ma Rainey, took Bessie under her wing, encouraged her to
sing the blues, and she travelled throughout the South with Ma Rainey's
Rabbit Foot Minstrels. As she grew into her late teens, Bessie
travelled with the Florida Cotton Blossoms and other tent shows, and
gradually she worked up to being a star attraction on the leading Negro
vaudeville circuit which booked performers into theatres, not tents.
This circuit was a combination of white managers and owners of Negro
playhouses known as the Theatre Owners Booking Association, T.O.B.A. —
which colored performers said meant, "Tough On Black Actors," since
that circuit often meant working many shows a day in hot over-crowded
theatres with only a cubby hold for a dressing room. But the top
stars were well paid, and Bessie was a top star. She "packed 'em in"
and audiences wept, shouted, screamed, and cried at her songs, the

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These great records were distributed and sold almost exclusively
to a Negro market — and they were best sellers. As her record
sales grew Bessie began to "live high" and to drink a great deal.
She was a kind and generous woman, though, who gave much of her
money away helping — or treating friends. But a great deal she
" sported " away, too, having a good time. She lived "not wisely,
but too well." Her voice grew rougher and harsher, but never
weak or tired. Her last recording session was in 1933, just ten
years after her first record was made.

By this time, Carl Van Vechten and other famous writers
had written about Bessie Smith — and of "her magnificent voice,
big enough to fill a dance hall, warm enough to enfold the whole
suffering world," as the *New York Times* later described it
— for her name and her fame had begun to spread from Negro circles
to white. She made a short film of the *St. Louis Blues*. She sang
for the United Hot Clubs of America, one of the first groups to
consider jazz a serious art. She had one unsuccessful engagement at
a Broadway night club where the hard simplicity of her primitive blues
were not appreciated. Back she went to the road again to sing for her
dark public in the deep South, doing one night stands, travelling
fast and hard, losing sleep and driving long distances to make engage-
ments. In an automobile crash in Mississippi in the middle of the
night, Bessie had an arm almost torn from her body. For a long time
she lay bleeding in the road. When they finally got her to a hospital,
it was a white hospital which would not treat Negroes. An attempt
was made to get her to Memphis where there is a Negro hospital. On the
way she died.

I remember Bessie Smith on the stage at the old Monogram and
the Grand in Chicago, the Grand Central in Cleveland, and the Lafayette

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She came out on the stage in ostracism feathers,
headed satin,
and shone that smile on us and didn't use the
lights and sang.

The authority on jazz, John Hammond, has written, "To my way
of thinking, Bessie Smith was the greatest artist American jazz every
produced. In fact, I am not sure that her art did not reach beyond the
limits of the term 'jazz'." And Max Mezzrow wrote that "She didn't
have any mannerisms... to send those golden notes of hers on their
sunshiny way. She just stood there and sang, letting the love and
laughter run out of her, and the heaving sadness, too... and swayed
just a little with the glory of being alive and feeling. And the
jazzman, Zutty Singleton said, "Yes, I remember Miss Bessie Smith ...
I remember she had a beautiful dress she wore for the show. It was
white. But when the electrician turned a certain kind of spotlight
on it, Bessie's dress would shine with beautiful colors which the
special light brought out. With the dress she wore a big headdress
— like the Queen of Sheba — and she was a queen, a magnificent
woman ... She brought out those blues right from the heart ...
No wonder everybody loved to listen to her sing. Yes, I remember
Bessie Smith. Man, I'm sure sorry for the folks who missed seeing
and hearing her."