My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Mahalia Jackson (1911): Divine One

59 Mahalia Jackson Divine One Forrest Hamer Studs Terkel describes that when he first heard Mahalia Jackson sing (a record store in Chicago happened to be playing her 1946 Apollo recording of “I’m Gonna Tell God All About It”), he was reminded of Enrico Caruso, for both of them continuously exceeded imagined limits of the human voice. The comparison is apt, for Jackson’s voice was operatic, an “uncommonly large” voice (according to biographer Jules Schwerin in Got to Tell It: Mahalia Jackson, Queen of Gospel [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]), and one prone to render epic the gospel songs she performed. 60 I have listened to her all of my life. Growing up in a very religious family, we listened to recordings of her voice in North Carolina on my grandfather’s Victrola (which played 78s); we listened in Germany, where my father was stationed in the late 1950s and then again several years later; and then throughout the rest of my childhood stateside. Her voice not only helped my family locate home in each new place, it made each place a possible new home. And because ours was sometimes the first black family in a neighborhood , being able to feel at home was crucial to our being able to thrive in not-such-promised lands. Mahalia’s singing was the unacknowledged other half to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington. Jackson had preceded his speech with a few songs, among them the spiritual “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned,” and she had requested that King forego another prepared speech to give this one. The speech completed a narrative arc set up by this particular spiritual—from an acknowledgement of deep, long-lived pain to astounding hope—and this arc characterized her performance of many of the songs she sang generally. It was an extraordinary confluence of an artist’s gifts with the historical moment . How appropriate it would also be that she would sing at King’s funeral some five years later. To the extent that a people and a self can be described separately , her voice also transcended any definition of particular identity . It was, of course, a unique voice—exceptionally controlled and unbounded, joyful and mournful, individual and cumulative; it was also one that could transcend itself by reaching far beyond what we were typically listening to hear. It was a voice I would be personally receptive to when, after spending most of my Sundays in church (morning, afternoon, and evening services), I was overwhelmed by gospel music and sermons, and simply wanted silence ; and even later when I came to reject much of the religious teachings of my upbringing. What I heard went beyond the limits of specific religious teaching: I heard in her voice the chance for Mahalia Jackson 61 ordinary grace and the promises of extraordinary transformation through devotional action. At the annual assembly of churches in the eastern part of North Carolina—the black half of the Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ denomination—several vendors sold sheet music on the grounds, and some of the most popular featured songs were written by Thomas A. Dorsey as sung by Mahalia Jackson. By the late 1960s the moniker “Queen of Gospel” was undisputed, and stories of prima donna behavior—occasional irascibility, refusals to sing until she’d been paid her high fees in cash, the dropping of her long-time accompanist Mildred Falls because Falls asked to be paid more, gaudy displays of her considerable wealth (her vigorous skin-lightening efforts late in her life, among them)—did little to tarnish the regard with which so many held her. She was Mahalia, after all, and her talents and causes suggested to us that her own relationship to her gifts was probably complicated and sometimes a little too much to bear. I did not know who or what I was going to be. As a young child, I suspected I would become an adult someday, and a man at that. This also meant I would not become a woman, despite my love of and for women and my awe of them. Mahalia’s powerful voice necessitated that I find some way of aspiring toward her emotional power while accepting I would never be someone who would sing the way she did (I didn’t know that...