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We’re singing from the hilltops today-- powerfully so!

Mahalia Jackson – “Go Tell It On the Mountain”

I wanted to put a dramatic version of the nativity story into this Advent calendar. But I have to be honest here: most of them are really very boring and the rest are really cloyingly sentimental. They’re stagey tableaux featuring plaster saints giving birth to mild babies. They’re too quiet. Too pastoral. Read the gospel of Luke and you have something far more harsh: a baby born in a stable. Huge explosions of angels, singing Gloria in excelsis.

Which is why I love Mahalia Jackson. I think just about every Christmas compiliation album in the '60s and '70s was required by unwritten law to include Jackson’s version of "Go Tell It On The Mountain." And not just any version--and she’s done several over her career, but the loudest, most passionate version imaginable. I wanted to find a YouTube clip of it to embed it but sadly they only have the quieter, mellower versions available. You can hear a sample of it on Amazon.com. If you like it, spend the $1 Canadian and download the MP3. It’ll be worth it.

There’s a reason why Mahalia Jackson is still regarded even today as one of the greatest Gospel singers who ever lived. When she sings the story of the Nativity in this version of “Go Tell It On The Mountain” she belts it. Listen to the average amateur choir sing this, everything gets all smoothed out; the chorus is transitioned by an endless “ohhhhhh ohhhhhhhhhh ohhhhhhhh”). Mahalia’s version is like listening to the voice inside a hurricane.

I love the way she sings the chorus, stabbing out every vowel/consonant combination: Gooo. Telll. Ittt. Onn theee. Moooounnnnn. Tainnn. She sings it like she means every dipthong. And then there’s the climactic bit where she almost screams “Everywhere!”

It doesn’t sound tidy, or neat, or gentle or even mild. It doesn’t sound anywhere near safe. It captures perfectly that sudden, dangerous quality of the gospel story. The sense that poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as “The horror and the havoc of it”.

The incongruity of it with the easy listening stylings of Glenn Campbell, Percy Faith and Johnny Cash struck me as very odd when I was a child. It was as though she was singing music from a different plane than the rest of them. Perhaps maybe Mahalia was.