Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Welcome to Rock and Roll Flashback Podcasts.  Today's episode reviews the career of Sister Rosetta Tharpe!

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a woman who broke every norm.  She was a thrice-married, bi-sexual woman who, for several years, toured with her gay partner.  She was a fearless and confident black artist who popularized gospel music by combining traditional gospel music with the sounds of jazz and swing.  Rosetta is often referred to as "the original soul sister" and "the Godmother of rock and roll".  The list of famous musicians who have cited Rosetta Tharpe as a major influence is extensive.  Her unforgettable voice, gospel swing crossover style, and guitar playing influenced a generation of musicians including such greats as Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Isaac Hayes, Tina Turner, and countless others.  In 2007, she was inducted posthumously into the Blues Hall of Fame, and on December 13, 2017, she was elected posthumously to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an Early Influence.

All podcasts on the Rock and Roll Flashback Podcast are produced by brothers-in-law Bill Price and "Jumpin' John" McDermott. The Podcast Theme Song, "You Essay", was written by John. It was initially recorded by Bill and John on April 1, 2004 with several revisions since then.
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Rock On!

Transcript

Thank you for that introduction and welcome to Rock & Roll Flashback!  I'm Jumpin' John, and we'll be looking back at some of Rock and Roll's greatest artists, songs, and stories.  In today's podcast I will discuss the career of the Godmother of Rock and Roll, Sister Rosetta Tharpe!

Rosetta Nubin was born on March 20, 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas.  Both of her parents were singers.  Rosetta's mother Katie was also a mandolin player, deaconess-missionary, and women's speaker for the Church of God in Christ.  With her mother’s encouragement, Rosetta began singing and playing the guitar as Little Rosetta Nubin at the age of six.  She and her mother performed with a traveling evangelist troupe in churches around the South.  By the mid-1920’s, Rosetta and Katie settled in Chicago, where they continued performing spiritual music.  With Chicago as their home base, Rosetta and her mother performed religious concerts and occasionally traveled throughout the US to perform at church conventions.

Rosetta developed considerable fame as a musical prodigy.  As she grew up, she began fusing Delta blues, New Orleans jazz, and gospel music into what would become her signature style.  Her distinctive voice and unconventional style attracted fans.  Rosetta sang with a resonant vibrato.  Both her vocal phrasing and guitar style drew heavy inspiration from the blues.  She further aligned herself with the secular world with her sense of showmanship and glamor, unique among the gospel performers of her era.  However, in the mid-1930’s female guitarists were rare.  Rarer still was a musician who pursued both religious and secular themes, a fact that alarmed the gospel community.

In 1934, at age 19, she married Thomas Thorpe, a Church of God in Christ preacher, who accompanied her and her mother on many of their tours. The marriage lasted only a few years.  However, Rosetta decided to keep a variation of her husband's surname as her stage name, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.  In 1938, she left her husband and moved with her mother to New York City.  Although she married three times, she performed as Rosetta Tharpe for the rest of her life.

Tharpe was determined to keep experimenting with her sound.  Her persistence paid off, and by 1938, at the age of 23, she had joined the Cotton Club Revue in New York City.  She appeared with Cab Calloway in October and performed in John Hammond's "Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall in December.  Tharpe signed with Decca and, on October 31, 1938, she recorded for the first time.  The four sides were the first gospel songs recorded by Decca.  "Rock Me", "That's All", "My Man and I" and "The Lonesome Road", were instant hits.   Tharpe became an overnight sensation and one of the first commercially successful gospel recording artists..  "Rock Me" showcased Rosetta’s distinctive guitar style and melodic blues mixed with traditional gospel music.  The song’s fusion of gospel and rock and roll influenced many singers, including Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis.  

As a young black woman working within a heavily male-dominated music industry in the 1940s, Tharpe wasn't shy about rattling conventions.  She signed a ten-year contract with Lucky Millinder, and in 1941 she began traveling widely with his swing band orchestra.  She recorded the song "I Want a Tall Skinny Papa" with them.  She also teamed up with the Jordanaires, an all-white male group, and began performing for mixed audiences.  Institutional racism in the mid-1940s was still rampant.  All restaurants and hotels were still segregated, so Tharpe slept on buses and often went to the back of restaurants for food while on tour.  Performing gospel music for secular nightclub audiences and alongside blues and jazz musicians and dancers was unusual, and in conservative religious circles a woman playing the guitar amid scantily clad showgirls in such settings was frowned upon. Tharpe fell out of favor with segments of the gospel community.   Many churchgoers were dismayed by Tharpe’s mixture of gospel-based lyrics and secular-sounding music, but secular audiences loved them.  So Rosetta was walking a musical tightrope, remaining in the good graces of her core audience by recording material like "Precious Lord," "Beams of Heaven," and "End of My Journey."  At the same time she also appealed to her growing white audience by performing rearranged, up-tempo spirituals including "Didn't It Rain" and "Down by the Riverside."  

Nevertheless, Tharpe gained a celebrity status.  During World War II, Rosetta was so popular with black soldiers that she was one of only two black gospel performers to record V-Discs for American soldiers overseas.  Tharpe toured the US throughout the 1940’s, backed by various gospel quartets, including the Dixie Hummingbirds gospel group.  In 1944, she began recording with boogie-woogie pianist Sammy Price.  Their first collaboration was the spiritual single "Strange Things Happening Every Day."  Recorded in 1944 and released by Decca, the song eventually reached #2 on Billboard's “race records” chart in May 1945.  It was the first gospel song to appear on the Billboard magazine Harlem Hit Parade.  It was also the first gospel song to cross over into the “race records” top 10 chart.  That the song was a cross-over hit was a rare feat for a gospel act.  "Strange Things Happening Every Day" would become one of Rosetta’s most well-known records.  Some even argue that it was one of the first rock and roll recordings.

Tharpe's 1944 release "Down by the Riverside" was selected for the National Recording Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress in 2004, which noted that it [and I quote] "captures her spirited guitar playing and unique vocal style, demonstrating clearly her influence on early rhythm-and-blues performers" [end quote].  

In October 1947, Sister Rosetta Tharpe overheard a fourteen-year-old named Richard Penniman singing her songs before her performance at the Macon City Auditorium.  She invited him to open her show.  After the show, Tharpe paid Richard, inspiring him to become a professional performer.  Richard called this [and I quote] “the best thing that ever happened to me” [end quote].  Penniman, who would later be known as Little Richard, referred to the stomping, shouting, gospel music performer as his favorite singer when he was a child.  

[Be sure to check back with Rock and Roll Flashback Podcasts, as we plan to devote an upcoming episode to the musical career of Little Richard!}

Sister Rosetta Tharpe had multiple personal relationships with both women and men.  Although her bi-sexuality was well known within the industry, the public was unaware.  In 1946, Tharpe saw Sanctified shouter Marie Knight perform at a Mahalia Jackson concert in New York.  Later the two singers teamed up.  Knight’s simple, contralto vocals made her the perfect counterpoint for Tharpe's theatrics.  During their performances they would sometimes act out the parts of "the Saint and the Sinner", with Tharpe as the saint and Knight as the sinner.  The duo's first single, "Up Above My Head," was a huge hit, reaching #6 in the R&B chart by the end of1948.  Over the next few years they played to large crowds across the church circuit, touring with their band.  They also took control of their own business decisions.  They boldly collaborated and performed as two gay black women in a relationship in the late 1940’s.  However, by 1949 their popularity was declining.  Around 1950 Tharpe and Knight cut a handful of straight blues sides, which disappointed many of their gospel fans.  Marie Knight wanted to pursue a career in popular music as a solo artist, and in 1951 the duo and partnership split. 

Sister Rosetta Tharpe then married her manager, Russell Morrison. The 1951 wedding took place in Griffith Stadium in Washington D.C., where over 20,000 paying customers attended.  A concert was recorded and later released as an album.  In 1952, Tharpe and Red Foley recorded the B-side "Have a Little Talk with Jesus", which is likely the first interracial duet recorded in the US.  In 1956, Tharpe recorded an album with the gospel quartet The Harmonizing Four, titled Gospel Train. 

Tharpe remained first and foremost a gospel artist, although her credibility and popularity were seriously damaged.  Her US record sales dropped off and her live engagements become fewer and farther between.  In 1957 Rosetta spent over a year touring clubs in Europe, waiting for the controversy to die down.  Tharpe's comeback was slow but steady, and by 1960 she had returned far enough into the audience's good graces to appear at the Apollo Theatre alongside the Caravans and James Cleveland.  In early 1964, Tharpe again toured Europe, this time as part of the Blues and Gospel Caravan with Muddy Waters and several other black performers.  A concert in the rain in Manchester, England, was recorded by Granada Television at a railway station in May 1964.  As she stepped down a horse-drawn carriage, with a gospel and blues rhythm playing in the background, she bobbed to the platform with a young gentleman on her arm.  She kicked off the performance with a gospel tune, "Didn't It Rain."  The band performed on one platform while the audience was seated on the opposite platform.  In the audience at that concert were four young British rockers named Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones.

On October 9, 1973, the eve of a scheduled recording session, Rosetta suffered her second stroke and died at the age of 58 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

Playing an electric guitar in the late 1930’s and 1940’s, Tharpe became a female guitar-playing celebrity before the men considered the pioneers of rock and roll had dreamt of doing so.  Rosetta was a pioneer in her guitar technique.  She was among the first popular recording artists to use heavy distortion on her electric guitar.  Rosetta was often complimented that she could "play like a man", demonstrating her skills at guitar battles at the Apollo.  Her guitar-playing technique had a profound influence on the development of British electric blues in the 1960s. Tharpe's guitar style blended melody-driven urban blues with traditional folk arrangements and incorporated a pulsating swing that was a precursor of rock and roll.  In 2023 Rolling Stone magazine named Tharpe the 6th greatest guitarist of all time.  When asked about her music and about rock and roll, Rosetta is reported to have said [and I quote}, "Oh, these kids and rock and roll; this is just sped up rhythm and blues. I've been doing that forever” [end quote].

Sister Rosetta Tharpe is widely acclaimed as one of the most influential gospel singers of her generation and of the 20th century.  She was a flamboyant performer whose music often flirted with the blues and swing.  She was also one of the most controversial talents of her day, shocking purists with her leap into the secular market.  By playing nightclubs and theaters, she not only pushed spiritual music into the mainstream, but in the process also helped pioneer the rise of pop-gospel.  She gained popularity in the 1930s and 1940s with her gospel recordings, characterized by a unique mixture of spiritual lyrics and electric guitar. In 1998 the US Postal Service issued a 32-cent commemorative stamp to honor Tharpe’s contributions to gospel music.  

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a woman who broke every norm.  She was a thrice-married, bi-sexual woman who, for several years, toured with her gay partner.  She was a fearless and confident black artist who popularized gospel music by combining traditional gospel music with the sounds of jazz and swing.  Rosetta is often referred to as "the original soul sister" and "the Godmother of rock and roll".  The list of famous musicians who have cited Rosetta Tharpe as a major influence is extensive.  Her unforgettable voice, gospel swing crossover style, and guitar playing influenced a generation of musicians including such greats as Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Isaac Hayes, Tina Turner, and countless others.  In 2007, she was inducted posthumously into the Blues Hall of Fame, and on December 13, 2017, she was elected posthumously to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an Early Influence.

This has been Rock and Roll Flashback…a look at the career of influential singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, called by many The Godmother of Rock and Roll!  I’m Jumpin’ John McDermott, and until next time…Rock On!