When I usually come across a stack of albums at auction, I bypass them. That’s what I had done with about six boxes on a table at the front of the auction house. They’re too heavy to carry and too hard to handle.
There’s never more than one or two in the boxes that I have any interest in, and there are always several bidders clamoring for them and bidding them much too high. At an auction this week, a box of albums (usually there are from 25-50 albums per box) went for $160.
As I made my first walk-through of the auction, two stacks of albums did stop me. An old-style album lay on top of one stack, and the face that stared out from it was a familiar one: Mahalia Jackson. Hers was among an array of gospel, comedy, jazz and other albums by African American singers and performers.
Nat King Cole’s famous “The Christmas Song” (which I play repeatedly at the holidays). Comedian Flip Wilson. The Rev. James Cleveland. Jazz pianist Errol Garner. Jazz organist Jimmy Smith. Comedian Moms Mabley.
All were very old albums of gospel and secular music (some from the 1960s) by people and groups I’d heard of and others unknown to me. I was even tempted to buy them.
This stack was unusual because all of the albums were by African Americans. Usually the boxes and stacks contain a mixed group of singers, from Elvis to Sinatra. These appeared to be someone’s personal selections, and that someone loved his or her jazz and gospel – the old stuff.
On the table in back of the albums were 12 related books, including two copies of Dorothy West’s “The Wedding,” “Goodbye to Uncle Tom” by J.C. Furnas, “Black Politics in Philadelphia” and “Afro American Literature Fiction.” An absentee bidder had already left a bid on them. There was also a 1966 souvenir program for the Philadelphia Annual African Methodist Episcopal Conference, along with a book on the history of the AME church.
When W.E.B. DuBois wrote his famous book about black folks and called it “The Souls of Black Folks,” he could’ve been talking about gospel music. It is the music that expresses an eternal and unrelenting love for a greater Being and His ability to make a way out of no way. No one could sing a song with the richness of that love like Mahalia Jackson – and then make you feel it to your core.
Just as no one could write a gospel song like the Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey, who became her musical advisor once she began her career. Dorsey was moved to write one of his most famous songs – “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” – after the death of his wife and son in childbirth in 1932. He poured out a pain so deep and raw that we feel it as thoroughly as he when we hear the song. He is considered the “Father of Gospel music.”
Mahalia Jackson is the one who made us feel it. Born economically poor in New Orleans but musically gifted with a lovely voice, Mahalia Jackson (I can’t seem to separate her two names) grew up singing in the church. According to one site, she sang three times a week at her church, four times on Sundays. She moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern cities and joined a gospel group. That’s where she met Dorsey, with whom she shared a long friendship.
“Precious Lord, Take My Hand”- one of my favorites that almost brings tears to my eyes whenever I hear it – became her trademark song.
Among the books at auction, the most familiar author’s name for me was West, who completed her second novel “The Wedding” when she was in her 80s and was re-discovered. It was published in 1995 and Oprah Winfrey produced it as a TV movie.
A member of the Harlem Renaissance, West wrote her first novel “The Living is Easy” in 1948, along with some short stories. She supported herself as a journalist and editor. West died in 1998 at age 91, one of the last from that great period in African American literature and arts.
