Albertina Walker
Albertina Walker has been a force in traditional gospel music for so long that she is affectionately known as the “Queen of Gospel.” The deeply religious singer has spent most of her life praising God with her music, first as a founder and member of the Caravans and later as a stirring solo artist. A star in her own right.
Albertina Walker was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, one of nine children in a hard-working Baptist family. “I grew up going to church,” Walker recalled in the Chicago Tribune. Her mother was a member of the West Point Baptist Church, and Albertina and her sister Rose Marie both sang in the choir there. When Walker was still a little girl, the church’s choir director formed a small children’s gospel group called the Williams Singers. With this group, and occasionally as a duo, the Walker sisters performed in churches throughout Chicago and the Midwest. Albertina loved the opportunity to sing. She remembers her childhood as very happy, untainted by the scourges of drug abuse or violence that afflict many youngsters today.
She form the group Caravans, as she put it, “since we gospel singers were forever traveling on the road.” From the group’s founding in 1952 until virtually the end of the 1960s, the Caravans dominated traditional gospel, performing all over America and Europe and in such celebrated theaters as New York’s Apollo, Carnegie Hall, and Madison Square Garden. The earliest Caravans recordings—including What a Friend We Have in Jesus and Blessed Assurance —feature Walker as lead vocalist.
On left is a YouTube recording link of Blessed Assurance.
In Black Gospel, Viv Broughton wrote:
“The superabundance of talent in the Caravans took them into the very front rank of gospel groups in the early sixties but it also generated an impossible pressure within the group itself. Eventually the constraints of the group proved too frustrating.”
One by one the various vocalists left in order to pursue solo careers, and in 1967 the Caravans disbanded. Walker, “the woman who launched more gospel careers out of one group than anyone else,” to quote Broughton, began to perform as a soloist as well.
Time has not dimmed the luster of Walker’s voice or cluttered the spirit of her message. She is often referred to these days as the “queen of gospel,” and is rivalled for that title mainly by former members of her group. In 1993 she received a Grammy Award nomination for Albertina Walker Live, and that same year she performed a concert for Nelson Mandela during his visit to the United States.
From her base in Chicago she has been active in politics, working with the Reverend Jesse Jackson and organizing the Operation PUSH People’s Choir. She is also the founder of and one of the chief contributors to the Albertina Walker Scholarship Foundation, a source of funds for aspiring young gospel singers.
On left is a YouTube video of Albertina Walker singing live “Lord Keep Me Day By Day”
Every summer the city of Chicago hosts a gospel festival. These sometimes feature Caravan “reunions,” at which Walker always shines. The singer was also featured in the 1992 film Leap of Faith as member of a spirited gospel choir. Walker, who continues to live in Chicago as her busy schedule allows, told the Chicago Tribune that her Christian faith has provided her with a full and happy life. “All the good things that have happened to me are because of my affiliation with the church,” she concluded. “I’d like to encourage young people to stay with the Lord, because if they do, he will surely stay with them.”
The singer was hospitalized around her 81st birthday, having long suffered from emphysema, and died at RML Specialty Hospital in Chicago on 8 October 2010.
“The Lord lets me sing,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 2004. “The only time I’ll stop is when the Lord says.”