Lynda Canaday hadn’t even let out her first baby bawl when world-class singer Mahalia Jackson blessed her voice.

The story goes that Jackson, a friend of Canaday’s mother and perhaps the world’s most famous singer of spirituals, laid hands on the pregnant woman’s belly during a prayer meeting and asked that Canaday be given a beautiful voice.

Canaday’s mother replied: “Well, who better than you to train her up?”

The result was Jackson being chosen as godmother to Canaday, and the start of a long career in music for Canaday.

Sunday, the 53-year-old soprano will highlight some of her favorite spirituals in a recital at Kansas University, where she is studying vocal performance. The concert starts at 2:30 p.m. in Swarthout Recital Hall, in Murphy Hall.

The program includes the familiar tunes “By and By,” “Elijah Rock” and “God is So Good to Me.”

Canaday, who used to sing professionally, says she feels like she’s come full-circle in her music career, which began when she sang in church as a child. She and her young friends were determined, if naive, church-goers.

“We’d play getting filled up with the Holy Ghost like other people would play house,” Canaday recalls. “We’d be jumping and shouting and speaking in tongues – all that.”

Canaday, who grew up in Southern California, spent summers with Jackson as she toured the United States. She took voice lessons from the spirituals star during the day and played backstage at Jackson’s concerts in the evenings.

“It was Mom Haley’s dream that I follow in her footsteps, and that I feel called to do that,” Canaday says.

But Canaday eventually found rock ‘n’ roll, bebop and classical music. In high school, she fell in love with Bach’s Mass in B minor, and she told Jackson she wanted to pursue a career in classical singing. The two argued over that decision in 1971, shortly before Jackson died.

“As wonderful as she could be, she was very strict,” Canaday says. “There were two ways to do things – her way and the wrong way. In that old school, if you weren’t doing gospel music, you were going to hell. And I was straddling the fence. I was going to church on Sunday, and going to hell on Monday, singing that worldly music.”

Canaday kept spirituals in her repertoire through the years as she taught voice lessons and sang some professionally.

When Canaday was growing up, her godmother sometimes would tell her she wasn’t old enough to learn some spirituals. Canaday never understood.

Now that she’s older, she realizes the spirituals – which talk about life as slaves – are talking about parts of her life, too. She’s black and blind, and she has faced discrimination through the years.

“Growing up, I was doing it because it was pretty music,” she says. “I didn’t understand the stuff, or a lot of it. Now that I understand it, I work to live it out. A lot of what the songs are about is my life experience. My faith is found in every word I sing in the spirituals.”

Julia Broxholm, assistant professor of music and dance at KU and Canaday’s voice instructor, says that sincerity is evident in her music.

Broxholm says it can be difficult to sing spirituals well if a singer also is classically trained.

“She learned at Mahalia Jackson’s knee,” Broxholm says. “Lynda sings what Mahalia taught her, except she sings it in her soprano range. There’s nothing square, stodgy or classical – nothing stuffy – about the way she sings it. She just lets it rip.”

Canaday is in her fourth semester at KU. She’s not sure what the future holds for her.

“At this point, I’m looking toward teaching,” she says. “Performing will always be my first love, but I don’t know where God’s taking me.”