Mahalia (Robin Roberts Presents, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I had wanted my husband Charles to have this Saturday off so we could be together when Lifetime aired its latest Black biopic, Mahalia, actually shown under the rubric Robin Roberts Presents: Mahalia because Roberts, listed in imdb.com’s credits for this show as one of two “executive producers,” seems to be their go-to person for stories about famous Black people. I first heard of Mahalia Jackson some time in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s when my mother brought home a copy of her second Columbia Records LP, Bless This House. I vividly remember hearing that LP and loving the rock ’n’ roll numbers like “Let the Church Roll On,” “It Don’t Cost Very Much” and “By His Word” as well as the searing ballads, though it took me a while to get into her treatment of white hymns like the title song and the piece that closed the album, Albert Hay Mallotte’s setting of the Lord’s Prayer. I happened to encounter this album at a time when “rock ’n’ roll” meant wimps like Frankie Avalon and Fabian, and in Mahalia’s music (and in the records of secular Black singers like Dinah Washington) I found the spirit other kids my age were finding on AM radio.

Later I learned that virtually all African-American music has its roots in the Black church; the people who were brought to this country as slaves got a weird sort of revenge by fusing their native culture with what got passed down to them by the whites. In converting them to Christianity the white masters might have thought they were teaching them to be docile and accept their lot as permanent servants, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. The early Black spirituals often seized on the stories of the Israelites in bondage and proclaimed them as hopes for their own liberation: “Go down, Moses/Down in Egypt land/Tell old Pharoah/LET MY PEOPLE GO!” The extent to which rock derives from the Black church, and particularly the religious ecstasy of its more out-there denominations, is clear in the terrific 1958 movie Jazz on a Summer’s Day, made at the Newport Jazz Festival – whose producer that year decided to broaden the program beyond jazz and present Dinah Washington, Big Maybelle, Chuck Berry … and Mahalia Jackson. Though she wasn’t considered a rock ’n’ roller, Mahalia closes the film with a three-song performance that totally out-rocks the great Berry: a mid-tempo version of “Heav’n, Heav’n,” a fast rockin’ version of “Didn’t It Rain?” and then a searing version of that boring Mallotte setting of the Lord’s Prayer that for once makes it seem worthy of the simple beauty of the words. (You can watch the whole set on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnljhXaApzQ.)

The film Mahalia was written by Bettina Gilois and Todd Kreiler, directed by Kenny Leon, adn features an incandescent performance by Danielle Brooks as Mahalia. I had vaguely heard of her before – apparently her most famous previous credit was on the premium-cable and streaming series Orange Is the New Black – but she’s terrific here. I am assuming she did her own singing for the role – the voice we hear is an amazingly close simulacrum of the real Mahalia Jackson’s and in both her vocals and her dramatic scenes, Brooks acts with power and authority and captures the contradictions of Mahalia’s career. The first hour of this biopic – Lifetime slotted it for three hours but it ended 25 minutes early and they filled in with brief interviews with Roberts, Brooks and some of the other people involved and previews of some of their other upcoming movies – is in a weird way The Jazz Singer in reverse. Though Mahalia is shown as a child listening to and singing along with a blues record (the scene is set in 1923 but the record is an LP – oops!) until her aunt (Marci Duke), who’s raising her in her native Louisiana, she takes her aunt seriously when she tells her that once she is formally baptized into the church she needs to use her talents to serve God.

From then on Mahalia pursues a career in gospel music with a single-minded determination even though she gets it from both sides: a friend hooks her up with a voice teacher who wants to get her to sing “correct” music to impress white audiences that Black people can do it. More sedate churches she sings at get rid of her when they find her hooping, hollering, hand-clapping and overall infectiousness totally against the image they have of how you worship God. (Mahalia herself recalled that when she made her way from New Orleans to Chicago in 1936 – following the trail the New Orleans jazz greats like Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Louis Armstrong had taken 20 years earlier – she got up in the middle of a church sing-along and started bouncing up and down. When the congregants gave her dirty looks and gestured at her to sit down, she said, “I’m from the South! That’s just how we worship!”) As she starts to build her career she gets a chance to make a few records for Decca, but they flop and it isn’t for another decade, until Bess Berman of Apollo Records auditions her in 1947, that she has the chance to record again.

Berman is depicted as a white woman (she was really Black, and while people who worked with her describe her as imperious and very bossy, no doubt she had to be to succeed as both Black and female in a white man’s business world) and she tries to lure Mahalia into recording as a blues singer because there’s far more money in that than there is in gospel. (This is another factual mistake: before Apollo signed Mahalia they already had a full line of gospel records – they were printed with lime-green labels instead of the black or purple labels of Apollo’s secular records – and in general labels catering to the African-American market liked gospel artists because their records sold steadily and the artists were generally churchgoers who didn’t have the alcohol, drug and sex addictions that all too often beset their R&B and soul counterparts. At least one white owner of a Black-oriented label said he kept his company’s gospel division going because it made steady money while he closed his soul branch because “we got the sales, but the artists were too much trouble.”)

When Mahalia starts out she has a husband named Ike (Jamali Johnson) I couldn’t resist joking, “If you’re a great Black woman singer, you gotta be careful if you’re married to a guy named Ike!” – who keeps slipping off and betting the family’s money on horse races (he probably had a few other less than respectable things going, but that’s the one the script focuses on), and Mahalia eventually breaks up with him while continuing a relationship with a young boy she meets at an audition for a late-1930’s musical called The Hot Mikado (a production of the Federal Theatre Project, a U.S. government program to keep theatre artists working during the Depression; it did a special outreach to Black performers that included Orson Welles staging a version of Macbeth that relocated the story from Scotland to Haiti and made the three witches voodoo hougans) and essentially adopted a street kid named John (Kenan Mentzos) as a foster son. Later we find the reason for this is at least in part because a white doctor had given Mahalia an unnecessary hysterectomy so she couldn’t have children of her own, and that had given her a lifelong distrust of doctors. (The history of white medical people using Blacks as involuntary research subjects – most notably the infamous “Tuskegee Experiment” in which young Black men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated because doctors wanted to observe the “natural” progression of the disease – is coming up again as a reason why it’s been so difficult to get Black Americans to take the COVID-19 vaccine.)

The story shows Mahalia Jackson managing to achieve success and sell not only to Black but white audiences as well – courtesy of a major-label contract with Columbia in 1955 and a radio show on which she was interviewed by Studs Terkel (Jim Thorburn) and talked about her life as well as singing – even though the love of her life, a minister named Russell (Jason Dirden), dies of cancer and Mahalia later enters into an unhappy marriage with a salesman whose main attraction seems to have been that he looked like Russell. The later part of the film shows a recreation of Mahalia’s incredible 1958 Newport performance – it had just turned midnight on Sunday when she went on and the announcer noted that fact and proclaimed it meant they were essentially in church – which Brooks does a good job of reproducing, though she delivers the line to the audience, “You make me feel like I’m a star!,” as if she’s boasting. In the real clip, Mahalia seems more embarrassed than anything else, as if she’s thinking, “No, I’m not the star. God is the star.” But it’s indicative of how great Danielle Brooks’ acting in the role is that that minor point is the one false note I found in her performance.

The film also goes into her involvement with the civil-rights movement in general and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in particular – though Rob Demeny, who plays King, is a major miscalculation in a movie that is otherwise almost flawlessly cast. About the only thing he has in common with the real Dr. King is they’re both Black men – and writers Gilois and Kreidler were handicapped by the Martin Luther King, Jr.’s estate’s ferocity in protecting his intellectual property. When Ava DuVernay made her great film Selma in 2014 the King estate wouldn’t let her use any of King’s actual speeches, so her writer, Paul Webb, had to make up speeches that sounded enough like what the real King might have said to be credible. In this film Gilois and Kreidler simply avoided showing King speak in public at all, which significantly weakens the scene taking place at the 1963 March on Washington. Mahalia had heard King do his “I have a dream” recitation at previous events and saw that at Washington, when King started to deliver a rather dull historical speech containing phrases like “the doctrine of interposition and nullification” that probably had his listeners either half-listening or wondering what the hell he was talking about (it meant the claim of Southern states that they had the right to assert their own authority and declare federal laws inoperative in their states), Mahalia saw he was bombing and yelled behind him, “Give ’em the dream, Martin! Give ’em the dream!” Alas, the scene as presented here falls rather flat since all they could do is reproduce the stage at the March on Washington with their actors and have Brooks yell “Give ’em the dream!” at Demeny. You’d have to know the real story already to make sense of the scene as presented here.

Also I was disappointed at the abruptness of the ending; the film depicts Mahalia Jackson singing both her and King’s favorite song, “Precious Lord,” at King’s funeral and then shows her mostly inactive for the last three years of her life until she scheduled a comeback concert – though her final performance in the film is at a small storefront church in Chicago where she and Mildred Falls (Joaquina Kalukango), her magnificent accompanist through almost her entire career, are reunited following an estrangement and Falls’ battle with arthritis. Alas, the film cuts straight from there to the closing credits – I would have wanted it to end with Mahalia’s passing and the story coming full circle with “Precious Lord” being sung at her funeral by Aretha Franklin. (If you want to hear a living singer with Mahalia’s power and commitment to God, check out “Unfinished” by the modern gospel singer Mandisa.) The real Mahalia Jackson did sing a few secular songs on occasion, including Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” Gershwin’s “Summertime” (which she did on Bless This House in a medley with the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”), and the title track of her final album, the Burt Bacharach-Hal David song “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” which I presume she felt came close to the spiritual feeling she’d expressed in music all her career. I could nit-pick Mahalia all afternoon for minor issues, but it’s such an overwhelmingly powerful story and is told so beautifully – with Danielle Brooks’ performance the spine around which this fine film is held – it’s a must-watch for anyone who cares about great music and spirituality and it does full justice to Mahalia Jackson and her timeless art.