Salem Baptist Church choir, where her remarkable contralto voice caught the attention of storefront and tent churches from New York to California. The larger, more formal congregations didn't approve of the rhythms of her songs and her energetic performances. When they frowned on her rocking, swaying, and shouting, she said: "I had been reading the Bible every day most of my life and there was a Psalm that said: ‘Oh, clap your hands all ye people! Shout unto the Lord with the voice of (triumph)!’ If I was undignified, it was what the Bible told me to do. I want my hands, my feet, my whole body to say all that is in me."

By the 1940s, Mahalia was celebrated worldwide for her voice and encouraged to sing the blues. She resolutely refused to perform the blues, saying they were "songs of despair ... gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you sing them, you are delivered of your burden."

In the 1950s her voice graced radio, television, and concert halls around the world. Her audiences were huge in Europe, and especially enthusiastic at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival-in a program she requested to be all gospel. Her voice carried God's Word into churches, prisons, hospitals, castles, parliaments, and to the White House.

From the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 until her death in 1972, Mahalia was a prominent fixture of the Civil Rights Movement and sang songs of courage, faith, and hope at most of the great rallies. In 1963, she sang an old slave spiritual before Dr. Martin Luther King’s "I have a Dream" speech; and she sang "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" at King’s funeral five years later.

When doctors ordered her to slow down, she refused: "I won't do anything less than all I can to help heal the divisions between black and white people in the United States and elsewhere." Mahalia collapsed while on tour in Munich in 1971; she died of heart failure on January 27, 1972, at her home in Evergreen Park, Illinois.

The following time line will help relate world events to Jackson’s life.