Revisiting the Queen of Gospel Music

Burford, trained in musicology at Columbia University, came up in a black Seventh Day Adventist church that did not practice gospel music. [...]he came to the music a bit later in life, first as an avid fan and then as a devoted scholar. Burford ends his story with the city’s 1955 birthday salute to Jackson, hosted by Studs Terkel, and featuring testimonies by a cadre of influential church leaders, journalists, and civic leaders including Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Burford concludes that Jackson served as something of a “cultural interpreter” as she “shuttled between the church and the world of popular culture, to negotiate and mediate the visceral pleasures new audiences took from the sound of gospel music…” LP audio recordings, radio, and the emerging medium of television came together mid-century to usher black gospel music beyond the confines of the African-Ameican church and into the realm of American popular culture.