This morning I want to tell you about the most famous gospel singer in America.  Her name was Mahalia Jackson.  She was born in 1911 in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Her family was extremely poor.  Thirteen people lived in three small rooms!  When Mahalia was five years old her mother died and she had to help clean homes to earn money to help support the family.  While she worked she sang.  Her Aunt Bell told her, “Halie, one day you will sing for royalty.”  Little did she know that this prediction would one day come true.

 

It was at the young age of five that one Sunday morning Mahalia dressed up in her best clothes and stood up in front of the her church to sing:

 

“I'm so glad I found Jesus.  I don't know about you, but He's a friend of mine.”

She became a member of the choir and of the church.

 

Mahalia only sang gospel music.  She sang to help heal people’s hurt, to give them joy, to remind them of the hope of Heaven.  Even though she received many offers for money, she refused to sing blues or other secular music.  She used to say, "I sing God's music because it makes me feel free.  It gives me hope.  With the blues, when you finish, you still have the blues."

 

Mahalia moved to Chicago at the age of sixteen.  There was work in Chicago, even though the jobs paid low wages and demanded long hours.  Mahalia worked as a clothes washer and house cleaner, earning about a dollar a day.  But every Sunday she sang to the Lord in her church.  She tried without success to get lessons from a famous Professor at the University of Chicago.  He thought her style was not refined enough.  Would she ever reach her dreams?

 

Then one day, when Mahalia was 23 years old, a record company asked her to sing “God’s gonna separate the wheat from the tares” for 25 dollars.  That was a lot of money in the Depression, when most people had no work.

 

As time went on Mahalia became noticed.  One label after another heard her incredible voice.  She got offers to sing live concerts.  In 1950, she was invited to sing at Carnegie Hall as the first gospel singer ever to sing there.  Two years later she took a boat to Europe for a singing tour.  She refused to fly in a plane, explaining, “If the good Lord had intended us to fly, he would have given us wings.”  In 1961, she sang for President John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration Ball.

 

In 1963, Mahalia Jackson sang in front of the largest crowd she had ever performed in front of.  It was the March on Washington, a protest for Civil Rights.  Here she sang “How I Got Over” and “I been ‘Buked and I been Scorned.”  Then Martin Luther King Jr. stood up and delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech.”  Near the end of the speech Mahalia Jackson called out to him, “Tell them about your dream, Martin.” King then launched into the extemporaneous and dramatic conclusion, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

 

Throughout her career, Mahalia brought the joy of gospel music to millions.  When someone asked her how she learned to sing, she replied, “I sing exactly the way I feel.”  She also used the money she earned from singing to help her family and the poor Chicago neighborhood she still lived in.  When Mahalia Jackson passed away in 1972, President Nixon said, “Millions of ears will miss the sound of the great, rich voice making a joyful noise unto the Lord.”