Betty, Betty, Betty. As a friend to my parents, she knew me before I knew of her. I grew up hearing about Betty Jackson King, her mother Gertrude Jackson Taylor, her sister Katherine Adams and the Imperial Opera Company. As I child I attended the Jacksonian Institute in the community of Woodlawn on Chicago’s south side. It was there that I met Arlene Sharp, Betty’s niece for the first time. My first real-time experience with Betty Jackson King, composer, director, teacher, and pianist was as a cast member of her sacred opera My Servant Job. I was 10 years old and a child member of the Imperial Opera Company chorus. I was so impressed by this experience, that years later I would ask Betty’s mother to put me in contact with her daughter. I wanted to ask Betty if the opera My Servant Job, could be produce as a community project. Mrs. Jackson Taylor said “of course” but that was one proviso; that the project would be the opera Saul of Tarsus.

This was when the mentoring friendship between Maestro Betty Jackson King and myself began. From that point on I began to learn about and understand the important gift Betty Jackson King was to all whose lives she touched, to the communities she served, and to our African American culture. I once had a conversation with the late, great William Warfield who spoke of her. He thought Betty was a musical genius. Betty inspired and touched any who heard or performed her music, any who met, or who knew her and any she taught and mentored. . There are two works composed by Betty Jackson King that are my favorites. They are the solo arrangement of the spiritual Calvary and of course, the opera Saul of Tarsus. These two works take their performers and their audiences on a spiritual journey to a time and a place that should never be forgotten. Betty Jackson King, an African American musical genius of the 20th century whose music transitions even now as a legacy into for the 21st.