In Popular Culture
- She appears in the 1960 film, Jazz on a Summer's Day – an artistic documentary filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. She sings three gospel numbers at the end of the film, including "The Lord's Prayer".
- In the 1958 movie St. Louis Blues, she played the character Bessie May and sang in the church choir.
- In the movie Jungle Fever, the character played by Ossie Davis tries to distract himself from his son Gator's (Samuel L. Jackson) crack cocaine addiction by listening to Mahalia Jackson albums by the hour.
- In the 1959 film Imitation of Life, Mahalia Jackson portrays the choir soloist, singing "Trouble of the World" at Annie's funeral. She has no speaking lines, but her singing performance highlights the climactic scene.
- In the 1964 Film The Best Man, Mahalia plays herself, singing at a Democratic Covention in a two-minute clip.
- Duke Ellington, with whom she occasionally recorded, paid tribute to her on his New Orleans Suite album with the song "Portrait of Mahalia Jackson".
Read more about this topic: Mahalia Jackson
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The best of us would rather be popular than right.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)