MAHALIA JACKSON

Jackson (1911/12-1972) was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a laundress and a Baptist preacher. She was raised by an extended family and was influenced by the strong musical life of New Orleans. She moved to Chicago in 1928 at 16 and joined a church choir where she began her career in gospel singing though she had wanted to be a nurse. She worked at Madame C. J. Walker's and the Scott Institute of Beauty Culture, gaining enough business experience to start her several business ventures. Her new businessman husband encouraged her business aspirations but realized the great potential of her developing musical talent as a bigger source of income. Though winning a record contract, she refused to sing the blues. Instead, the "Father of Gospel Music," composer Thomas A. Dorsey, became her musical advisor and accompanist from 1937 to 1946. Jackson sang Dorsey's songs in church programs and at conventions to promote the new songwriter's compositions. By 1947, Jackson had become the official soloist of the National Baptist Convention and was singing the works of other Chicago songwriters. During the 1950s, she was featured on the noted Chicago journalist Studs Terkel's television program, and by 1954 she had her own radio and television show while owning a flower shop in Chicago and traveling to perform concerts. Signing her most lucrative record contract in 1954, Jackson's concerts were increasingly heard in concert halls with fewer in the churches. Among the notable achievements of Jackson, many are "firsts" for those in the gospel music field. She appeared in concert at Carnegie Hall in 1950 and at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. Jackson toured Europe in 1952, 1962, and 1963-1964, and also sang in Africa, Japan, and India in 1970. During the 1960s, Jackson was a loyal friend and supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King, who featured her singing at the 1963 March on Washington rally at which King made his famous speech, "I Have a Dream." She also sang at his funeral five years later. Though Jackson was not the first, and possible not the finest, gospel singer, it was largely through her compelling contralto voice and her personality that people of all races throughout the world came to respect gospel music as an idiom distinct from classical black spirituals.

SCOTT JOPLIN

Joplin (c.1867-1917) was born somewhere in northeast Texas, and grew up in Texarkana, on the border of Texas and Arkansas. He apparently learned the rudiments of piano on an instrument in a white-owned home where his mother worked. After instruction from a local German-born music teacher, he started his musical career in the 1880s in St. Louis, which was to become a major center of ragtime. In 1893, he was in Chicago at the time of the World's Fair, leading a band and playing cornet, probably somewhere outside the fair grounds. Thereafter he lived as an itinerant musician with a band. When not traveling, he made Sedalia, Missouri his home. He played piano at the Maple Leaf social club and published his first compositions and rags in the late 1890s. It was in 1899 that he published “The Maple Leaf Rag,” which was to become the greatest and most famous of piano rags. His contract specified that Joplin would receive a one-cent royalty on each sale of the sheet music, a condition that rendered Joplin a small, but steady income for the rest of his life. By 1909, approximately a half-million copies had been sold, and that rate was to continue for the next two decades. In 1901, Joplin had moved to St. Louis with his new wife. Among Joplin's significant publications in St. Louis was “The Entertainer” (1902). After a failed tour in which his music was confiscated and lost, he went to Arkansas and met Freddie Alexander, a 19-year-old woman, and was so taken with her that he dedicated “The Chrysanthemum” (19014) to her. In the summer of 1907 Joplin went to New York to make contacts with new publishers and to find financial backing for Treemonisha, an opera he had been working on for the past few years. In 1908 he self-published his ragtime manual School of Ragtime, and finally had his opera self-published in 1911. The opera's story, also written by Joplin, takes place in a rural, black community in Arkansas, not far from his childhood home of Texarkana, and is a tribute to both his mother and to his second wife. The editor of an influential music journal declared it to be the most American opera ever composed. Despite this encouragement, Joplin was never to witness a completely staged performance of his opera.

In 1913 Joplin formed, with his new wife Lottie, his own publishing company, and during the next two years, he composed several new rags and songs, a vaudeville act, a musical, a symphony, and a piano concerto, but none of these were published and the manuscripts have been lost. By 1916, Joplin was experiencing the devastating physical and mental effects of tertiary syphilis, a disease he had probably contracted almost two decades earlier. By mid-January, 1917, he had to be hospitalized, and was soon transferred to a mental institution where he died on April 1, 1917. At the time of his death, he was almost forgotten. Interest in ragtime, too, was quickly waning as the new style of "jazz" took center stage. But Joplin never slipped totally into oblivion. His “Maple Leaf Rag” continued to exercise its magic on successive generations of musicians and music lovers. The revival in Ragtime (“traditional jazz”) peaked in the 1970s as new recordings of Joplin's music, produced for the first time on classical labels, set classical sales records. At the same time, Treemonisha was successfully staged, finally reaching Broadway. This quickly growing presence inspired a film director to use Joplin's music in his film The Sting, which became immensely popular and brought Joplin to the notice of the mass public. In recognition of his significant achievements, the Pulitzer Committee in 1976 issued a posthumous award for Scott Joplin's contribution to American music.

Reference
Berlin, Edward A. King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era. New York: Oxford, 1994.