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Moving On Up A Little Higher contains twenty-two previously unissued songs dating from 1946 to 1957, Mahalia’s golden age. It includes her finest Newport Jazz Festival concert, her reunion with Thomas A. Dorsey, and her most powerful single performance, recorded during a broadcast at Chicago’s Greater Harvest Missionary Baptist Church.
 The most varied and fundamental introduction ever to the Queen of Gospel — Milo Miles, Fresh Air
Reviews: JazzWax Journal of Gospel Music NPR: Fresh Air
New Orleans Advocate
Incalculably valuable . . . One extraordinary emotional peak after another — Downbeat
Absolutely essential
— Living Blues
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Grammy Award Winner
Out of Print
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The first recording to feature Mahalia performing live in church. Though her voice was largely shot, nothing like the peerless contralto of ten years earlier, her spirit was undiminished.
How I Got Over, raspy growls and all, may be her definitive performance. She would recreate it in 1963 at the March on Washington. Also includes her only a cappella recording,
I’ve Been Buked and I’ve Been Scorned, another song
she performed at the March.
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Harris’ comeback album, including soulful versions of standards like Stand By Me, Never Grow Old, and Everybody Ought to Love Their Soul. The highlight may be He Never Left Me Alone, a duet with Reverend Leroy Taylor, his pastor, and former co-star in The Soul Stirrers and The Christland Singers, a quartet originally formed by three ex-Soul Stirrers, Harris, James H. Medlock, and Taylor. Claude Jeter said that Taylor was The Soul Stirrers’ “greatest gospel man” (house-wrecker); Harris went further, and said “he was the most feared lead singer ever to step on a stage.”
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Grand Prix du Disque Winner
Out of Print
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Heilbut’s first album with Marion Williams.
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Heilbut’s favorite of the two anthologies, this 1972 release includes 1920s discs like Blind Willie’s Dark was the Night, the previously unissued He is My Story by Arizona Dranes, a sanctified pianist, famous for her elbow stomps, and Lord I’m the True Vine, by Eddie Head and Family, perhaps the first recording by a mixed-group, and with guitar accompaniment; and staggering live performances by Marion Williams (Lord I’ve Had My Day), Bessie Griffin (Too Close) and Mahalia Jackson (He’s Right On Time) from thirty years later. Columbia allowed Heilbut to lease outside tracks, and he included classics by Dorothy Love (That’s Enough), R. H. Harris (I’m Willing to Run), and The Pilgrim Travelers (I’ve Got a New Home — led by Jess Whitaker, one of his favorite quartet baritones).
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Out of Print
Purchase MP3 Files
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Heilbut’s first album, an anthology that ranges from Blind Willie Johnson* and Reverend J. M. Gates to Mahalia Jackson, The Abysinnian Baptist Church Choir (favorites of both Tony Bennett and Tom Waits), The Dixie Hummingbirds with Ira Tucker and Paul Owens, Marion Williams, Dorothy Love Coates, The Angelic Gospel Singers, and The Staple Singers.
“For 30 years the best Gospel collection and some of the
best American art.” — Hank n Tennessee, Amazon.com
* Another of Blind Willie’s classics, Dark was the Night, was chosen by Heilbut for The Gospel Sound, Volume II, and was subsequently selected by Ann Druyan to fly into the heavens on the Voyager Space Capsule.
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