Drawing on and piecing together a trove of previously unexamined sources, this book is the first critical study of the renowned African American gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (1911–1972). Beginning with the history of Jackson’s family on a remote cotton plantation in the Central Louisiana parish of Pointe Coupée, the book follows their relocation to New Orleans, where Jackson was born, and Jackson’s own migration to Chicago during the Great Depression. The principal focus is her career in the decade following World War II, during which Jackson, building upon the groundwork of seminal Chicago gospel pioneers and the influential National Baptist Convention, earned a reputation as a dynamic church singer. Eventually, Jackson achieved unprecedented mass-mediated celebrity, breaking through in the late 1940s as an internationally recognized recording artist for Apollo and Columbia Records who also starred in her own radio and television programs. But the book is also a study of the black gospel field of which Jackson was a part. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, black gospel singing, both as musical worship and as pop-cultural spectacle, grew exponentially, with expanded visibility, commercial clout, and forms of prestige. Methodologically informed by a Bourdiean field analysis approach that develops a more granular, dynamic, and encompassing picture of post-war black gospel, the book persistently considers Jackson, however exceptional she may have been, in relation to her fellow gospel artists, raising fresh questions about Jackson, gospel music, and the reception of black vernacular culture.
