Here's Jackson singing "I Been 'Buked and I Been Scorned" at the March on Washington right before King spoke. It's no wonder Jackson was King's favorite gospel singer, and that he would be so inspired by her at just the right time. It was the same body, the same voice, but the voice had something I had never heard before." "It was as if some cosmic transcendental force came down and occupied his body. "I have never seen him speak the way I saw him on that day," Jones said. Jones said when Jackson called out to King it was like a "mandate to respond," and King's body language transformed from lecturer to preacher. Jones isn't sure, but he thinks Jackson must have heard one of King's earlier versions of the "dream" speech, and that she knew the moment called for it. Then King started speaking completely off the cuff. "Then he takes the text of the written speech that's been prepared, and he slides it to the left side of the lectern, grabs the lectern, looks out on more than 250,000 people there assembled." Jones remembers turning to the person next to him and saying, "These people out there, they don’t know it, but they’re about ready to go to church." It was, Jones said, "one of the world’s greatest gospel singers shouting out to one of the world’s greatest Baptist preachers." Jones, who was standing about 50 feet away from King during the speech, recalled that King looked over at Jackson briefly after she shouted. It was at that moment, says King's adviser Clarence Jones, that Mahalia Jackson cried out: "Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!" Instead of calling on the crowd to "go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction," he went with: "Go back to Mississippi go back to Alabama go back to South Carolina go back to Georgia go back to Louisiana go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed." So the "bad check" image won out - at least in the original printed version of the speech, which doesn't even mention the word "dream." (Can you imagine generations of schoolchildren being taught about MLK's "Insufficient Funds" speech?)īut during delivery, King started improvising a bit when he reached a sentence that felt clunky. King originally thought the speech should be lower-key, since he was speaking to a broad audience about controversial themes. Check out the Detroit version of the speech here - it has a lot in common with the much more famous March on Washington version, but the rhetoric is a bit less soaring and the grievances a bit more specific. And then there was the idea of King's "dream" for a nation undivided by racial tensions, which he had used in speeches throughout the previous year in cities like Detroit and Birmingham, Alabama. There was the image of a "bad check," representing America's failure to deliver on her promises of freedom to her black citizens. King himself was torn between two metaphors he liked, figuring he only had time for one. His advisers argued over which themes he should include. King had struggled with his speech, which was supposed to be kept to five minutes. "Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!" This bond of mutual inspiration and respect between King and Jackson came at a pivotal moment during the 1963 March on Washington. Even in moments when King felt discouraged, he would call Jackson on the phone just to hear her sing. Jackson was devoted to King, and accompanied him into the most hostile parts of the segregated South for rallies and demonstrations. Her voice became "the soundtrack of the civil rights movement," as NPR's Sonari Glinton put it. After that, she frequently accompanied King to perform at rallies and events. Shortly after meeting King at the National Baptist Convention in 1956, Jackson agreed to sing at a fundraising rally for the Montgomery bus boycott. She was also instrumental to the civil rights movement, especially as a good friend of King's. She mentored Aretha Franklin and Della Reese, and in 1961 was the first gospel singer to win a Grammy. Jackson, known as the Queen of Gospel, was a musical legend who helped bring gospel from church to mass audiences. Without Mahalia Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech might never have happened.