The Mahalia Jackson Reader
signed with major label Columbia Records in 1954. The newest entry in OUP's celebrated Readers on American Musicians series, The Mahalia Jackson Readerplaces Jackson's musical performances and their reception against key changes in 20th-century America, changes that include transformations of the
recorded music industry, the increasing visibility of the civil rights movement, a florescence of Cold War-era religiosity, and an explosion of popularity of black gospel music itself. Jackson's career combines parallel tracks as a black church singer and as a national pop celebrity, and makes her
one of the most complex and important black artists of the postwar decades. Gospel is a particularly challenging genre to study because of the paucity of sources. Becauseof Jackson's celebrity, there is more substantial coverage of her life and work than other gospel artists, but Jackson scholarship is still largely dependent on trade biographies from the 1970s for source
material. For this reader, Mark Burford has gone beyond the standard biographies and has drawn from extensive archival research, including in the volume interview transcripts and the largely-untouched papers of Jackson's associate Bill Russell, who kept a journal tracking Jackson's activities from
1951 to 1955. The new sources - in particular Russell's notes - uniquely enable an assessment of the reciprocal relationship between the two careers Jackson pursued, essentially simultaneously: as an in-demand church singer in Chicago, and as a media star for a major network and recording label.
| Publisher Name | Oxford University Press USA |
|---|---|
| Author Name | Hagendorf, Col |
| Format | Audio |
| Bisac Subject Major | MUS |
| Language | NG |
| Isbn 10 | 0190461659 |
| Isbn 13 | 9780190461652 |
| Target Age Group | min:NA, max:NA |
| Dimensions | 00.93" H x 00.06" L x 00.00" W |
| Page Count | 472 |
Mark Burford is Associate Professor of Music at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he is also chair of the American Studies program. His research and teaching focuses on twentieth-century popular music in the United States, with particular focus on African American music after World War II, and
late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German concert music.
