Happy Birthday to Mahalia Jackson, the Queen of Gospel
by Chris Heagle, technical director
Mahalia Jackson would have been 100 years old today. To celebrate, here’s one of her best-loved interpretations, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”
She recorded over two dozen albums in her lifetime, won five Grammy awards, and was honored from nearly every direction — from gracing a 32-cent stamp to being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She appeared in a few films, most memorably perhaps in Imitation of Life and was a smash at the Newport Jazz Festival. Hers was the chosen voice for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral. Though she was often courted by other artists to crossover and sing jazz or blues, she never did, saying famously, “When you sing gospel you have a feeling there is a cure for what’s wrong.”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
However hard I try…
“However hard I try, I find it impossible to construct anything greater than these three words, ‘Love one another’ — only to the end, and without exceptions: then all is justified and life is illumined, whereas otherwise it is an abomination and a burden.”
–Mother Maria of Paris
"
His disciples said to Him, “When will the repose of the dead
come about, and when will the new world come?”
He said to them, “What you look forward to has already come,
but you do not recognize it.”
—
The Gospel of Thomas (via theorthodoxheretic)
I’ve always been so intrigued by the Gospel of Thomas. I need to read more.
(via lemdi)
(Source: theorthodoxheretic, via lemdi)
