A New Book About Mahalia Jackson and Gospel

from the Oxford University Press Web page

At the beginning of last December, Oxford University Press (OUP) published the first book about Mahalia Jackson to appear in 25 years. The book was written by Mark Burford, Associate Professor of Music at Reed College, with the title Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field. For the better part of the twentieth century, Jackson acquired the reputation as the “World’s Greatest Gospel Singer.” That reputation remained, for all intents and purposes, unchallenged until her death on January 27, 1972; and many would hold that the reputation is still solidly in place.

As the title suggests, however, Burford’s book is not exclusively about Jackson. It is also about what workplace anthropologists have come to call the “community of practice” that formed among gospel singing with particular attention to black practitioners. Now any anthropologist worth his salt subscribes to the motto that “context is everything;” and Burford’s book clearly honors that precept. Indeed, Burford has been almost frighteningly industrious in turning up what the OUP advance material describes as “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.”

Massive as that quoted phrase may be, it turns out to be an iceberg large enough to bring down the RMS Titanic. Burford’s text is positively saturated with sidebars that digress into innumerable topics that are related to the basic narrative thread but, more often than not, are expounded at such length that the reader risks losing his/her grip on that thread. (As might be guessed, these sidebars are embedded in the flow of the text, rather than allotted a suitable place “on the sidelines.”) As a result, there is so much density of content and so little effort to sort out primary from secondary that even the most enthusiastic reader may feel as if (s)he has been inextricably mired in quicksand. If that were not enough, it would appear that Burford cannot resist the opportunity to show off his command of academic jargon (more likely to have come from continental Europe rather than any part of the United States), leading even the most well-intentioned reader feeling as if he had been imprisoned in a graduate seminar on hermeneutics.

Back in 1966 Hawthorne Press published Movin’ on up, identifying authorship as “Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wylie.” Wylie had interviewed Jackson for an article published by The Saturday Evening Post in 1959; and the book basically involves fleshing out the “skeletal structure” of that interview. When I picked up the book, I assumed that Wylie himself had done all the writing; but, on the basis of the background knowledge I had acquired (which included Burford’s book), I felt as if I was listening to Jackson’s voice while I read. What I most admired was the clarity with which that voice spoke, a great relief from Burford’s text, which, by comparison, revealed itself as ponderous academic strutting.

What matters most, however, is not Jackson’s “autobiographical voice” but her singing voice. At the end of the day, Burford’s writing is too detached from the core concept of “practice” to be of any assistance to a reader interested in listening to Jackson’s recordings (or, for that matter, learning to sing black gospel music). Where the documentation of anthropological field work is concerned, the best writing can still be found in Paul Berliner’s monumental Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1994. An equally satisfactory account of black gospel practices will have to wait for an author with Berliner’s skill set.