Albertina Walker
Albertina Walker was a contralto gospel singer and the founder of the gospel group “The Caravans”. At the age of four, she began singing in the children’s choir. At 17 while a student at Lucy Flower High School, she was a member of the Pete Williams Singers and toured with the Robert Anderson Singers. Between 1947 and 1949, Walker sang secular songs in Chicago nightclubs. She joined the Melody of Zion Gospel Singers in 1949 and remained a gospel singer the rest of her life.
Albertina was greatly influenced by Mahalia Jackson, her friend and confidante, whom Jackson took on the road when Albertina was just a teenager. In the early 1950s Walker founded her own Gospel music group The Caravans, which included gospel legends James Cleveland and Shirley Caesar. Her discovery of these artists resulted in the nickname “Star Maker”. Walker retired The Caravans in the late 1960s, performing as a solo artist. In the mid-1970’s Ms. Walker started recording a series of solo projects, many of them with big church choir.
These churches included “The Evangelical Choir,” “The Cathedral of Love Choir“, and her own church choir, “The West Point Choir.” Albertina recorded her first solo project Put a Little Love in Your Heart in 1975. She also recorded several projects together with Reverend James Cleveland. Albertina has been involved in other projects outside of performing gospel. She organized the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH People’s Choir. Her philanthropic works included her own scholarship foundation for the arts.
In 1994, Chicago honored Walker by renaming a section of Cottage Grove Avenue near 35th Street “Albertina Walker and The Caravans Drive.” The same year she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the Chicago Theological Seminary. Walker’s solo career produced more than sixty albums, and has garnered several Grammy nominations and in the mid-1990s won the Grammy for best traditional soul gospel for “Songs of the Church: Live in Memphis on Verity“.