Mahalia Jackson was born on October 26, 1911, in a shotgun house between the railroad tracks and the Mississippi River levee in the Carrollton section of New Orleans. Her father worked three jobs; her mother died when Mahalia was five, and she was raised by her strict Aunt Duke in the deeply devout Baptist tradition of the city's Black community. She sang in the choir at Plymouth Rock Baptist Church and Mount Moriah Baptist Church, absorbing both the sanctified expressiveness of the holiness tradition and, secretly, the blues records of Bessie Smith that she played when no one was listening. That double inheritance — the moaning ecstasy of the church and the deep soul of the blues — defined everything she would become.
At sixteen, Jackson moved to Chicago with her aunt to seek work. She joined the Greater Salem Baptist Church choir and almost immediately distinguished herself. Her deep contralto voice, raw and propulsive, drew on the full-throated tone of the Sanctified church, the blues-drenched phrasing of her Baptist upbringing, and a physical expressiveness — the rocking, the shouting, the emphatic bodily emphasis — that scandalized conservative northern preachers and transfixed everyone else. Through the 1930s she toured midwestern churches and recorded for Decca. In 1946 she signed with Apollo Records; her recording of "Move on Up a Little Higher" in 1947 sold nearly two million copies and made her a national celebrity overnight.
