In the mid-1930s, Mahalia Jackson was earning $12 a week as a hotel maid in Chicago and a couple of extra dollars singing at funerals.

So when her new husband, Ike Hockenhull, lost his job and pleaded with her to audition for a role in an all-black production of Gilbert and Sullivan, Jackson agreed.

Not only did she land the part that paid $60 a week, but her husband also found work selling insurance on the same day.

Time to celebrate? Not for Jackson. She picked up the phone and turned down the part over her husband's protests. The religious Jackson wanted to sing her brand of gospel music, not show tunes.

When she wouldn't sing blues for Decca Records a couple of years later, Decca ripped up her contract. Still, Jackson held fast to her beliefs.

"It is easy to be independent when you've got money," she wrote in "Movin' On Up," a 1966 autobiography. "But to be independent when you haven't got a thing -- that's the Lord's test."

*Rich In Talent *

Jackson, who grew up in poverty in New Orleans in the care of a strict aunt, found inspiration and fulfillment in religion and music. For her, the two were inseparable; she sang to lift herself, as well as her audience, to a higher plain. In dedicating herself to gospel music, she expanded its reach beyond the church and helped fortify black Americans in their struggle for civil rights.

At the request of Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson sang, "I Been 'Buked and I Been Scorned" in front of 200,000 at the 1963 March on Washington rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Thirteen years earlier, the Queen of Gospel was the first gospel singer to perform at Carnegie Hall.

Eight of her records sold more than 1 million copies, including her first big hit in 1947, "Move on up a Little Higher," which sold several million copies. She was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 1972.

Jackson grabbed on to whatever could lift her. As a child, she had to work instead of attending school. Biographical accounts differ concerning the exact time she left school -- the fourth or eighth grade -- but it's clear Jackson had to quit and was lonely. Her mother died when she was 6, and her father, who lived nearby, had no time for her.

"Church was Wednesday and Friday night and four times Sunday," wrote Roxane Orgill in "Mahalia: A Life in Gospel Music." Halie, as she was called as a child, never missed.

In "Movin' On Up," Jackson recalled: "Aunt Duke stood for so little play at home that I used to spend all my spare time at the Baptist church. If you helped scrub it out, they might let you ring the bell for the early-morning service."

Jackson was different. She didn't conform to the expectations of her aunt or Baptist preachers unhappy with her boisterous style of singing.

Her brand of gospel really derived from the influences of jazz, blues and ragtime that she picked up growing up in New Orleans.

The biggest influence on her was the Sanctified or Holiness Church next door to her home.

Her aunt raged about the raucous rhythms emerging from the church, but Jackson, in her loneliness, found the music exhilarating. "We Baptists sang sweet ... but when those Holiness people tore into 'I'm so Glad Jesus Lifted Me Up!' they came out with real jubilation," Jackson wrote. "They clapped and stomped their feet and sang with their whole bodies. They had a beat, a powerful beat, a rhythm we held on to from slavery days, and their music was so strong and expressive it used to bring tears to my eyes."

After Jackson followed another aunt to Chicago in 1928, ministers there thought all that hand clapping and stomping was undignified. They said she was bringing jazz into the church.

When one preacher stood up and spoke out against Jackson from the pulpit, she stood her ground. "I got right up, too," Jackson wrote. "I told him I was born to sing gospel music. Nobody had to teach me. I was serving God. I told him that 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 a trumpet!'"

Jackson threw her whole heart into her singing. There was nothing contrived about it.

"A song must do something for me as well as for the people that hear it," she said. "I can't sing a song that doesn't have a message. If it doesn't have the strength, it can't lift you. I just can't seem to get the sense of it."

Her conviction was so strong, her passion so deeply felt, that others couldn't fail to be moved.

"Whenever Mahalia Jackson poured the power and the majesty of her voice into one of her favorite songs, 'I Believe,' there could never be any doubt that she meant it, meant every word," wrote longtime New York Times music critic John Wilson. "She believed in her God and she believed in herself. And the sincerity of her belief rang through every note that she sang. Because of her belief, she cut a very straight, direct path through life and she held to it all the way."

Her talents might not have exceeded all other gospel singers, wrote Henry Pleasants in "The Great American Popular Singers," but she became the Queen of Gospel because of the force of her personality.

Jackson's dedication was complete. Her performances could carry on for as long as three hours.

*Moving In*

Jackson didn't let anything stand in her way. She bought a house in an all-white neighborhood in Chicago's South Side in 1956, though the real estate agent warned her the neighbors would make trouble.

Even before she moved in, someone fired air-rifle pellets, shattering a window. She got threatening calls. Jackson moved in anyway. She held to her beliefs in her music and life. She believed in a greater cause than herself.

"The success of one Negro doesn't mean anything if every Negro isn't completely free," she said.

When Ralph Abernathy asked her to come to Montgomery, Ala., amid the bus boycott, Jackson replied, "Of course I'll come." Later, when King needed bail money for protesters jailed in Birmingham, Jackson went straight to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to ask for a place to put on a benefit concert. The event raised $50,000.