When Mahalia Jackson first recorded “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away” in 1937, she was relatively unknown, an aspiring artist who had migrated ten years earlier to Chicago from her New Orleans birthplace. The song—based on Revelation 21:4 in the King James Bible: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away”—was composed in 1935 by New Orleans native Antonio Haskell. The 25-year-old Jackson recorded her seminal version for the Decca Coral label on May 21, 1937, along with “God’s Gonna Separate the Wheat from the Tares,” “My Lord,” and “Keep Me Everyday.” The session was a commercial failure.
But seven decades later, well after Jackson became internationally renowned as the Queen of Gospel, and “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away” was ensconced as a gospel masterwork (recorded by Dorothy Love Coates & the Gospel Harmonettes, the Pilgrim Travelers, and many others), Jackson’s performance caught the attention of Kronos Quartet founder and artistic director David Harrington. “The song was on the first CD of a French box set of the complete recordings of Mahalia Jackson,” Harrington recalls, “and it totally jumped out at me—the tempo, the sound of the organ, the emotion in her voice—it was all astounding. I just loved this song.”
Jacob Garchik initially arranged “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away” for the quartet’s collaborations with the Malian ensemble Trio Da Kali—in concert and on the 2017 recording Ladilikan. With singer Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté delivering the vocal in an impassioned contralto akin to that of Jackson, the strings supplied the accompaniment that had been played on organ by Estelle Allen in 1937. Retooling the piece for Kronos’ performance repertoire came naturally. “I looked at the arrangement,” Harrington explains, “and realized that [violinist] John [Sherba] and [cellist] Sunny [Yang] and I could play all the chord notes—most of the time we’re playing double stops—and that Hank [Dutt] could play the melody on viola.”
All four musicians pored over the 1937 Mahalia Jackson recording. “It became like a score, really,” Harrington says. “Hank, in particular, studied Mahalia’s vocal vocabulary. The biggest challenge was getting the emotional message of the voice.” For Harrington, Sherba, and Yang to sound even more organ-like, Kronos employs a sound design originally developed for their interpretation of the Swedish folk song “Tusen Tankar”, on which, Harrington says, “we needed to approximate a harmonium.” With Dutt filling Mahalia Jackson’s lead role, the other three musicians use heavy, metal practice mutes that dampen the strings, and sound engineer Scott Fraser adds various effects, including an octave divider on the cello.
“It’s an extension of our work,” Harrington notes. “It’s very natural. The more I’ve played with Hank over the years, the more I’ve known that his sound and Mahalia’s deserve mention in the same sentence. The performance brings together something that belongs together.”
Program note by Derk Richardson
