Mark Burford's Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field is a must-read for American music scholars, gospel music specialists, music educators, and fans of the most successful gospel music singer of all time. Although Jackson has received the most biographical treatment of any female gospel artist (including biographies intended for children), no biography to date has offered the same kind of deep examination into Jackson's early life, early career, and emergence into mainstream American music as Burford's study.Footnote 1 The richness of his analysis in all of these areas fills considerable gaps in the biographical information about Mahalia Jackson's life, career, and how she navigated the multivalent spaces of religious and secular communities in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York on her way to becoming the Queen of Gospel Music. In eleven chapters and almost 500 pages, Burford adds to current gospel music scholarship by demonstrating how it has moved beyond general biographies of pioneering figures and commercially popular artists. Much like recent work by Robert Darden and Robert Marovich, Burford's biography builds from established definitions, timelines, and stylistic eras of gospel music to thoroughly contextualize its vanguards and iconic figures.Footnote 2 Burford's archivally rich chronicle explores Jackson's early years in a way that allows readers to consider the impacts of factors such as class, gender, region, migration, collaborative networks, and the American music industry on the national and global dissemination of Black gospel music.
The book's rich introduction establishes its scope and introduces “the Black gospel field”—a theoretical frame extending from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural production that includes the networks and communities of musicians, churches, evangelists, promoters, community stakeholders, Black social organizations, and businesses that undergirded gospel music's cultural production beyond Sunday morning church spaces as early as the 1930s. Burford's interpretation of Jackson's career within these predominantly African American networks and relationships is a more expansive approach to gospel music research than previous biographies, as well as an innovative means to centralize Jackson's own voice and agency in her career, as she moved beyond the church concert and mid-western gospel music circuits into an almost singular position in mainstream American sacred popular music. Burford explores Mahalia Jackson's choices (or choices she was forced to make) during her career based on four principal forms of prestige that “agents in the gospel field recognize and attribute to singers: devout integrity, charismatic artistry, recognition and pop-cultural cachet” (27). Although this framework is particularly useful for an analysis of Jackson's active career as a performer and recording artist, it is also useful for researching gospel artists from the Golden Era to today.
Key to Burford's success is a critical re-evaluation of well-known primary sources. In Chapter 2, titled “Family Affairs Part 1: The Clarks of Louisiana,” Burford offers an astute race-class analysis of primary documents in order to address key discrepancies about the facts of Mahalia Jackson's early life in Louisiana, her upbringing, and her subsequent move to Chicago. Chapter 3, titled “Family Affairs Part II: Black Baptists and Chicago Gospel,” chronicles the Black church music and nascent gospel music scenes that would become Jackson's home for the rest of her life and career. Like Marovich, Burford dives into the nuances of the early years of gospel music in Chicago and the tensions and contrasting aesthetics moving through what would, as a consequence of the Great Migration, come to be one of the largest urban Black communities in the United States. Burford keenly describes the emerging gospel music field and early gospel artists who were experiencing internal pushback from both its pioneering creators and middle-class respectability sensibilities in the Black church. In the process, he also implicitly explores the ways that these groups situated themselves vis-à-vis the aesthetic influences of the Holiness and Pentecostal gospel singers and evangelists, who were often placed at the social margins of Black urban Christian communities at the time. In addition to considering Jackson's interactions with the Black church, Burford also offers nuanced insights into her relationship with the popular music industry. Chapter 4, “Gospel Singing as Black Popular Culture,” lays out the breadth and depth of the Black gospel field prior to Jackson's Carnegie Hall debut in 1950 and her ascendance into mainstream American popularity. The multi-city network of venues and cultural workers that Burford describes gives readers a more substantial understanding of the African American entrepreneurs, religious groups, social organizations, and Black-owned publications that could sustain a market for Black popular entertainment, regardless of genre designation, in the midst of Jim Crow. Burford gives much-needed attention to pioneering promoter Johnny Meyers of New York and his Golden Gate Auditorium shows. Although some “worship wars” scholars consider the concept of “Christian entertainment” to be a post-modernist convention that emerged during the 1970s, Burford's thorough documentation of the gospel field during this era reveals the concept has much earlier origins.
Chapter 5, “Apollo Records and the Birth of Religious Pop,” and Chapter 6, “Mahalia Jackson's Apollo Recordings,” offer a historical and critical assessment of Jackson's career as a recording artist for the small independent Apollo Records label. Though mutually reliant on each other, Jackson and Apollo Records, especially the company's co-owner Bess Berman, had an often contentious relationship. Burford highlights the label's dubious business practices and suggests that they exemplify the calculated exploitation of gospel artists and songwriters, some of whom were Jackson's peers and friends. Chapter 6 allows Burford's thoughtful musical analysis to shine with a thorough stylistic analysis of Jackson's Apollo recordings from 1946 to 1954. Burford's careful descriptions bring musical analysis to a very broad readership. Not only does he insightfully introduce a more nuanced way of analyzing the styles of vocal and rhythmic performance that Jackson employed during her years with Apollo, he does so in a way that contributes to how music theorists, musicologists, and gospel performers have tried to describe the intangible elements in gospel performance practice that often thwart the rules of traditional Western art music-based theory. For example, when analyzing and transcribing Jackson's lyrical phrasing and rhythmic practices, Burford builds from Boyer's concept of the “gospel meter” or the “gospel feel.” He not only takes into account the interplay between the solo vocalist and instrumental accompaniment but also incorporates what he calls the “gospel seesaw” effect. This rhythmic dynamic occurs when backing vocalists are added to an arrangement or when an accompanist interpolates rhythmic fills typically provided by quartet styled gospel singers (203).Footnote 3 He uses descriptions, deep listening, charts, and musical transcriptions that are manageable for non-music scholars. General audiences, vinyl aficionados, and even those new to Golden Era gospel music can pull up every song on YouTube and read along with the text. This chapter can be useful in undergraduate music courses as well as in graduate-level contemporary music theory and analysis courses.
Chapter 7, “Hearing Voices,” considers Jackson's own voice using archival records and recordings created by her first long-term personal assistant, Bill Russell. Russell's copious documentation of Jackson's life through audio recordings and journals includes detailed descriptions of her home rehearsals, public interviews, and the numerous public appearances where Jackson was engaged to perform as a singer or program host. In addition to describing the mechanics of Jackson's singing voice, Burford describes how Jackson thought about her singing prowess against the social politics of Black vocal aesthetics and public perceptions of black singers in a highly racialized society. Jackson's vocality is situated within the common dichotomy of “unlearned” vernacular traditions and “cultivated” traditions that require formal training (particularly those informed by Euro-American art music traditions). Burford keenly notes that perceptions of Jackson's voice and her presumed “natural” talent served both marketing goals and the various narratives built around her, which depicted her as a gospel singer who could attract audiences beyond the Black church community. However, he also notes how these same perceptions overshadowed vernacular forms of study and cultivating the voice within the Black community. These networks of community-based music education crystalized how modern gospel music would be performed in contrasting ways. In addition to the vernacular traditions and sacred folk idioms they were raised with, some gospel singers also received formal voice training and preparation techniques from educated professional African American singers. These formally educated vocal coaches aspired to perform Western art music like pioneering singers Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. Both groups of educators, coincidentally, were also supported by the same churches and community institutions that anchored the gospel field in Black communities across the country.
Chapters 8 through 11 delineate Jackson's vast career-changing performance opportunities of the 1950s, highlighting her move from Apollo Records to her historic CBS radio shows, her first record contract with Columbia, and her own Chicago-based CBS television program. Burford's examination of both Russell's fastidious documentation of Jackson's day-to-day life (and his involvement in Jackson's career) and Jackson's deliberate and continued participation in Chicago's local Black churches grounds the keen analysis of shifts in Jackson's repertoire and her navigation of multiple public spaces as the “Queen of the Gospel Singers.” Chapter 9 includes a thematic breakdown of all twenty radio shows Jackson produced for CBS. Chapter 10 offers a thorough account of the development and production of Jackson's first two Columbia Records albums, recorded in 1955, while she was in the midst of recording for her radio show for CBS. At the time, Columbia Records was one of the largest labels in the U.S., and, with her work for CBS, offered the singer unprecedented visibility and prestige. Burford notes, “It is this layering of assigned identities—Jackson the paragon of gospel, Jackson the embodiment of holistic theories about the Black vernacular, and Jackson the transcendent artist—that decisively staked out her exceptional position within the Black gospel field and within American popular culture” (344). Chapter 11 brings the book full circle, situating Jackson the public figure within the spaces of her own community in Chicago, within the larger community among her professional peers, and in relation to new fans among white audiences locally, nationally, and internationally. Burford is the first to give serious attention to Jackson's locally broadcasted CBS television show, Mahalia Jackson Sings, which aired about a month after her national radio program ended in 1955. Burford notes that, in this medium, Jackson had more control over her repertoire and the show's format, as well as enjoying the leverage to advocate for the participation of luminaries like Thomas Dorsey, Thurston Frazier, and others she came in contact with as a part of the national Black gospel field.
Jackson's career was far from over by this point, but it is clear why Burford limited the scope of this biography to this time frame. Jackson's productivity and activity across so many dynamic mediums—mostly simultaneously—beyond a doubt illustrates why Mahalia Jackson is “an exceptional case” within the Black gospel field (xi). The richness and thoroughness of this biography makes it a resource not only for fans and historians interested in Mahalia Jackson, but also for twenty-first-century educators and scholars in need of a grounded and analytical text that explores one of black sacred music's global icons. Many of the shortcomings and even inaccuracies of early Jackson biographies are addressed and contextualized with rich and in-depth analysis, based on archival and primary sources than had not been available to previous authors. Though it does not chronicle the singer's entire life and career, this biography does much to provide possibly the best written testament of the complexities of Jackson's origins, her genre–defining performance practice, and her ascent to gospel star and musical icon.
