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65. Way Up In Jerusalem
Written & Performed by Mahalia Jackson
From the CD Essential Mahalia Jackson (Columbia/Legacy, USA 2004)

 

 

Way up, way up
Way up, way up
High up in Jerusalem
When I die
(repeat)

God knows I’m gonna
Walk in Jerusalem
Talk in Jerusalem
Sing in Jerusalem
Be in Jerusalem
High up in Jerusalem when I die

Oh, be in Jerusalem
Sing in Jerusalem
Shout in Jerusalem
Pray in Jerusalem
High up in Jerusalem when I die.

Hmm, when I get down to the river
I’m gonna stick my sword in the sand
For I spy the old ship of Zion
Who took a-many to the Promised Land
Way over in Beulah

Where there ain’t no dying there
Where the saints shouting victory
Oh, they singing, Lord, everywhere
Way over in Beulah

I hear the voice of friends I’ve known
They been gone on, gone on to Glory
Well, well a long time ago
They been waiting
They been watching
They been waiting at the beautiful gates
And one day I’m gonna meet them
Oh, I’m gonna sing forever more
Way over in Beulah

I see the Captain beckon to me
Well, he’s calling all God’s children
Oh, to meet him on the Promised Land.

God knows I’m gonna
Walk in Jerusalem
Talk in Jerusalem
Sing in Jerusalem
Be in Jerusalem
High up, oh, in Jerusalem
When I die, Oh yeah
Well, be in Jerusalem
Sing in Jerusalem
Shout in Jerusalem
Sing in Jerusalem
High up, oh, in Jerusalem
When I die.

A song in which death is the threshold across which lies the promised land, not a geographical location, but a place which is figured in speech and writing, writing and song, in which Jerusalem is the city of the dead, city of the eternal day of the book of Revelation, populated by the citizens of the segregated world into which Jackson was born and in which she wrote this song.

A song about death as a form of transition, an act of transformation, death as an act of turning away, from the world to the grave, having done with this world, the world having done with this life, this body.

The song performs an exaltation of the coming and passing of death, which is not to say that the song is a celebration of death, or that the plains of its promised land are spectral, but that the song is an after effect, an aftermath of a perhaps not so joyous measuring of this life, this world, in which all was found wanting, even the body. All this, even as the song affirms the body and its voice and its community, which is the world, and suggests, joyfully, the body in death, emptied and unburdened of the world.

Is it possible to listen to such music and not be struck, moved, transformed, by this affirmation? And yet if we were to dispense with this affirmation and its pleasurable effect, might we not hear something of some other emotion for this negation of the material world, maybe a sense of despair, an abjection, in this rejection of the world, the body, the senses, of the world and its endless play of meaning?

It is possible that we might discover a trace, secreted between the song’s desire for that which can only be achieved through the annihilation of the singer and her song, and the song’s expression of a desire for a place beyond death which is conditional on an affirmation of life, a coupling of differences irreconcilable in the world outside the song, a measuring of the claims to truth of this life – and the discovery that these truths are fictions which need be tolerated only for so long as life goes on, and which end at death’s door, death’s open doorway being the scene of the song’s longed for transformation in which ‘Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the LORD delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married’ in ‘the Promised Land, in Beulah, where there is no death, way over in Beulah’.

Way over by way of death and its negation. At one, at long last, with the logos and its land, an impossible Israel, one which can exist not in this world but, through the song, in the song, in death and after death, and is the destination of the exile’s final journey.

Sources

Isaiah 62:4 via http://www.bible-history.com/kjv/Isaiah/62/

 

 

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