Andrés, I'm here, reading and very interested by the variety in the answers. I'm an interviewer by trade and by inclnation. I love to get a good conversation started.

When I was in college, a friend took me to a local high school. He said there was a singer whom I ought to hear. THe performance was in a high school auditorium in what was then called the Negro part of New Haven. Our two white ovals shone in a sea black faces but we were soon forgotten when the sionger who turned out to be Mahalia Jackason came on stage.

It would probably help to understand that I had never heard Mahalia Jackson before, I'd mnever heard of her, and I had extremely little exposure to African-American Gospel music - there hadn't been much of it around in New Hamshire, that I knew of.

I don't remember what I thought when she first started to sing but it wasn't long before I realized that I was taking part in something wspecial. The audience was a part of this concert, not by shouting although sometimes by clapping in the rhythmn of the singer and the accompanyoing piano but mostly just by somehow resting within the music, as though they were cradled in the rhythmn, words and melody. Their, our, attention was riveted on the singer. She might have been singing "he holds the whole world in his arms" but she she was holding her audience in the palms of her hands and she knew what to do with us.

She had the ability to use her voice and presence to raise the audience up to the edge of frenzy and then she would turn the power down a bit, letting us gather ourselves back together. Slowly, she would begin to raise us again to the edge of wildness. It was an almost sexual experience.

Did she have a great voice? I would say that without question she did but, as with all great performers, she had something else, something that was hers alone and she had learned how to make the best of it.

Sourdough