Precious Lord, Take My Hand (Ledisi)

This is the only recording of the three that exists inside a scene. In Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), Ledisi plays Mahalia Jackson, and in a moment of doubt for Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) she answers his phone call by singing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” The soundtrack, released digitally on December 23, 2014 through Paramount Music, carries her version as a standalone track. NPR’s Ann Powers wrote in January 2015 that the hymn helped the film make a well-known story “powerfully intimate.”

That framing is both the record’s appeal and its risk. A singer cast as Jackson in a film that shows King leaning on the song has two jobs at once: serve the scene, and sing the hymn well enough to stand on its own once the scene is gone. Ledisi comes to the job with a personal reason to take it seriously – she has said she was introduced to Jackson’s music through her great-aunt Gussie, who sang spirituals – and with a jazz and R&B career of her own. The sensible approach, and the one the scene’s premise invites, is to answer Jackson rather than reproduce her: an imitation of the definitive recording would lose to the definitive recording, while a singer answering a call from someone in pain has something else to offer.

It is also a version whose reach comes from the film rather than from a chart run or an award, and that context keeps it a step below the two recordings that shaped the song’s history on their own terms. But as a 2014 introduction to a 1932 song for an audience that may never have heard it, it is a respectable one.

7.6/10 – a film-scene performance that serves the hymn and the story at once, and stays a shade below the recordings that made the song.

Hero image: Ledisi at Cosmopolite, Oslo, April 30, 2024. Photo credit: Tore Sætre, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.