Abstract
American performance traditions and music industry trends have historically denigrated religious practices and spaces that African descended people considered sacred or worthy of regard. This legacy of sacrilege is an extension of colonialism wherein the cultural traditions of those conquered are marked primitive, strange, or laughable. Mahalia Jackson resisted such colonial systems of meaning through her discursive song and narratives incorporating both sacred and vernacular Black American traditions across the United States of America and Europe. It was her European success in the early 1950s that boosted her domestic career and distinguished her from peers with equal or greater talent. This critical hearing of her performance, together with a brief archeology of the term “gospel,” reveals how Jackson’s decolonial song labor disrupted structures that had previously excluded the African descended practices and people, and Negro women in particular, from the realm of the sacred.
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Notes
To be clear, Goeman also suggests that notions of sovereignty are not reliant on land or only tied to physical place, but bodies and relationships.
This study avoids blanket usage of the term African American because some African descended people of the USA with Caribbean genealogies do not prefer the term African American. I use the pan-ethnic term Negro when discussing African descended people in or from the USA through the Civil Rights era, and I use the pan-ethnic term Black as a proper noun (capitalized) when referring to African descended people in or from the Americas starting with the Black Power and Black Arts movements. My use of the term Negro is also an act of reclamation for a term that is widely accepted as a proper noun, when Black is not. When discussing issues of skin color or phenotype independent of a person’s chosen or family identity, I use the term black-bodied to indicate the collapse or disregard of social and cultural specificity for people with dark skin.
Between 1894 and 1905 from Victor and Columbia phonograph companies, there were over 200 recordings with “coon” or “darkie” in the title, more than 30 with “nigger” in the title, at least another 50 ridiculing “Negro” events like weddings and funerals through songs and dialog and scores more with benign titles but malignant anti-Negro content. Many more qualified as “coon” songs without coon or darkie in the title so the actual number far exceeds 250.
Kelley reminds us that African Americans of the Jim Crow South lived in a world that was more racist or colonial from their vantage point. I build upon Robin Kelley’s idea that the concept of soul was an assertion that there are “black ways” of doing things, even if those ways are contested and the boundaries around what is “black” are fluid.
While most recordings had generic titles like “Little Alabama Coon” (1899) and “A Big Fat Coon” (1901), some titles directly addressed citizenship and surrounding political rights like “The Patriotic Coon” (1899), “When a Coon Sits in the Presidential Chair” (1899), and “Every Race Has a Flag but the Coon” (1900) demonstrating that such performances were not divorced from the social and political stakes of racial inequality. Various artists from well-known vaudeville performers to the Metropolitan Orchestra recorded this “coon” work for companies including Victor (which would later become RCA) and Columbia (which would later become Sony Music), and the recording trend did not completely fade until 1930. See Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings n.d., compiled by Ted Fagan and William R. Moran; edited by Sam Brylawski, Regents of the University of California.
I mostly use the word “performance” to denote that which is delivered live and in person (even if also delivered through media) as a bracketed or staged event showcasing vocational practitioners or those cultural recognized as designated presenters. I use the term “performative” to denote social ways of presenting that take place without being announced as events, and without any vocational or cultural designation associated with the presenter.
Here, I am building on Cheryl Sander’s ideas about certain worship practices reflecting an exilic consciousness that is constituted by the concurrent phenomenon of “the saints’ rejection of the world and the world’s rejection of the saints” often due their Africanist worship styles that privileged improvisational music and dance.
These singers included the following: Thomas Rutling, who was an original Fisk singer of the 1870s who never returned to the USA and taught and performed modified spirituals in England for several decades; Roland Hayes, who in the early 1900s was a singer with the all-male Fisk Jubilee Quartet before embarking on his international solo career; Paul Robeson who performed and took up residence in Europe in the 1930s; and finally, the four-man singing group Golden Gate (Jubilee) Quartet, who traveled extensively across continents for over three decades.
The term first employed by Mendi Obadike in Low Fidelity: Stereotyped Blackness in the Field of Sound, Ph.D. Dissertation (Durham: Duke University, 2005) was later incorporated by Nina Eidsheim in a discussion of race and voice.
According to the 1930 census, Negro women reported the following labor statistics showing that almost 70% worked in the service industry: 35.4% service work, 27.2% servants/laundresses, 26.9 agriculture, 3.4% professional, 0.8% trade, 0.1% public service, .6% clerical, 5.5% Manufacturing, 0.1% Transportation; Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteen Census of the United States: 1930, Population, Volume 5, General Report on Occupations, Chapter 3, Color and Nativity of Gainful Workers. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933), Tables 2, 4, and 6.
Another article mistakenly associates Jackson with the “Southern Baptist Church Association” instead of the “National Baptist Convention.” The two groups are the result of a split that took place after the Civil War. The National Baptists are a conglomerate of Black churches.
A few years later, CBS radio (as a trademark of Columbia) offers Jackson a radio show then compiled her on-air performances, promoted them alongside Golden Gate radio performances, and licensed them for manufacturing and distribution in Europe.
In many cases during the blues revival of the 1950s, British and German writers and concert promoters commonly mis-identified gospel music practitioners as blues performers in a very similar manner to the way writers and promoters in the USA had previously assigned the category swing to gospel music. Perhaps then, blues would have ultimately become the commercial identity of the sacred genre if Jackson had never propagated the term “gospel” through industry channels.
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Wilson, A.L. Preserving Sacred Space: Mahalia Jackson’s Transnational Song Labor During the Era of Decolonization. J Afr Am St 23, 34–51 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-019-09426-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-019-09426-w