SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING, 2016
VOLUME TWO NUMBER THREE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
LEO SMITH
March 26-April 1
AHMAD JAMAL
April 2-8
DIONNE WARWICK
April 9-15
LEE MORGAN
April 16-22
BILL DIXON
April 23-29
SAM COOKE
April 30-May 6
MUHAL RICHARD ABRAMS
May 7-13
BILLY HARPER
May 14-20
SISTER ROSETTA THARPE
May 21-27
QUINCY JONES
May 28-June 3
BESSIE SMITH
June 4-10
ROBERT JOHNSON
June 11-17
http://www.guitarworld.com/forgotten-guitar-hendrix-elvis-and-chuck-berry-there-was-sister-rosetta-tharpe/25851
Forgotten Guitar: Before Hendrix, Elvis and Chuck Berry, There Was Sister Rosetta Tharpe
11/18/2015
by Jonathan Graham
GuitarWorld
SISTER ROSETTA THARPE
(1915-1973)
You
could be forgiven if you've never heard the name Sister Rosetta
Tharpe—or if you're surprised to hear that to many, she's considered
“the Godmother of Rock and Roll."
Sister Rosetta might not be a household name; however, as a young
woman during the 1940s through the Sixties, her recorded music and live
performances played a highly significant role in the creation of rock,
with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Little Richard and
Chuck Berry citing her as an inspiration.
As a musician, she was simply ahead of her time. Maybe even by several decades.
Born in 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Tharpe developed her
distinctive style of singing and playing at age 6, when she was taken by
her evangelist mother to Chicago to join Roberts Temple Church of God
in Christ. At 23 she left the church and moved to New York. While
performing there, she was signed by Decca Records. For the following 30
years she performed extensively to packed venues across the U.S. and
Europe and recorded more than a dozen albums.
Sister Rosetta died in 1973, and very little video footage exists of her today. However, what is around is not to be missed.
The clips below, which were shot in the 1960s, feature Rosetta armed
with her '62 Gibson Les Paul Custom (renamed SG in 1963). In the top
video, she's playing “Up Above My Head,” a reimagined church standard
with an added guitar solo, while a full gospel choir claps their hands
in time to the music.
In the second video, Rosetta plays “Didn't It Rain.” It was recorded
under the eaves of an abandoned train station just outside Manchester,
England, in 1964.
Rosetta’s remarkable musical legacy is undoubted by those who know of her impact on modern music.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe performs "Didn't It Rain" and "Trouble in Mind" in Manchester in 1964:
Sister Rosetta Tharpe Performs 'Didn't It Rain' and "Trouble in Mind" in 1964 at a disused railway station platform in south Manchester, UK.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jonathan Graham is an ACM UK graduate based in London studying
under the likes of Guthrie Govan and Pete Friesen. He is the creator of
the Forgotten Guitar Facebook page, a classic-guitar media website, and is completing his debut album, Protagonist, due for release in 2016. Updates also can be found at Graham's YouTube channel.
http://fusion.net/story/107215/meet-sister-rosetta-tharpe-the-black-woman-who-invented-that-rock-and-roll-sound/
The first rock star
3/20/15
FUSION
Meet Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the black woman who invented that rock and roll sound
Rosetta Tharpe was born 100 years ago today—March 20, 1915, twenty
years before Elvis, a decade before Chuck Berry. And she could play the
rock and roll guitar better than anyone, before anyone.
Now, rock and roll has a lot of parents. Any movement so big in
popular music isn’t just invented by one person. But if anybody can
claim the title of Mother of Rock and Roll, it would be Sister Rosetta
Tharpe. Coming out of the gospel world, she was willing to cross over
into playing for secular audiences, and more importantly, she just knew
how to wield the axe in a way that is uncannily modern.
“She had a major impact on artists like Elvis Presley,” her biographer Gayle Wald told
a documentary film crew. “When you see Elvis Presley singing songs
early in his career, I think you [should] imagine, he is channeling
Rosetta Tharpe. It’s not an image that I think we’re used to thinking of
in rock and roll history. We don’t think about the black woman behind
the young white man.”
But we should! Not just because it is historical truth, but because
Rosetta Tharpe is an amazing, amazing musician who was so far ahead of
her time (and something of a superstar in her time, too).
“She did incredible picking. That’s what attracted Elvis to her,”
Gordon Stoker, who led Elvis’ backing band, told the documentary crew.
“He liked her singing, too. But he liked her picking first, because it
was so different.”
Her 1944 hit “Down by the Riverside” features a solo section where
she just shreds the guitar. Like, the kind of shredding Michael J. Fox’s
character tries to pull off in Back to the Future. And this was before the end of World War II!
Just watch her go here, at the beginning of the documentary about her life. She was a rock star before there were rock stars.
In her day, it was mostly men who played the guitar. And not much has
changed, except rock guitar players are ever whiter, as the music gets
farther from its roots in blues and R&B. And yet, there she is,
proof positive that there was a super talented woman blowing minds a
half decade before Chess Records coalesced in Chicago and a full decade
before Elvis Presley ever even walked into Sun Records in Memphis.
This isn’t to take anything away from later rock artists, who
obviously extended the genre in ways that were good and interesting. But
when we think of the pantheon of great rock figures, Sister Rosetta
Tharpe should be at the front of the chronological list. Period.
Perhaps my favorite video of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, though, comes
from much later, 1964, after her work (like many other blues players)
was rediscovered by British rock musicians. She toured England, and for
the show in question, she arrived at the Manchester stage in a
horse-drawn carriage. She’s nearly 50. Her hair is up. She’s wearing a
thick wool overcoat that was cut to drape around her like a dress. Her
legs poke out the bottom, elegantly dropping into high heels.
A guitar is slung around her neck. Hundreds of cheering fans sit in
bleachers. As soon as she begins to play, you know she will bring down
the house.
She died in 1973. It would be her 100th birthday today, and I’m sure if she were still alive, she’d still be doing exactly this.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Untold Story
04.23.2007
When you talked about Rosetta Tharpe you talked about a ball of energy. This woman would come out on the stage she’d have people laughing, she’d talk to them in a way that it was almost like she was related to them. And when she finished her act, they were standing. You know, they would love this woman. And she was a lovable person. I mean she was an approachable person. Even though she was a diva too, you know, because she did play the diva role. —Ira Tucker
The time: the early 1960s. The place: a television studio. The occasion: the taping of TVGospel Time,
a national program, before a live audience. A modestly dressed
middle-aged woman takes the stage, launching into an improvised
rendition of “Up Above My Head,” a church standard, accompanying herself
on electric guitar. Behind her the white-robed mem- bers of a full
gospel choir clap their hands in time to the music.
Up above my head, I hear music in the air
Up above my head, there is music in the air
Up above my head, music in the air
And I really do believe, really do believe joy’s somewhere.
Up above my head, there is music in the air
Up above my head, music in the air
And I really do believe, really do believe joy’s somewhere.
It’s a commanding enough performance, the woman singing and playing
with jaunty confidence, despite the canned context. Then, two-thirds of
the way in, during a guitar solo that serves as the bridge, something
astonishing happens. The church faithful might see it as the Holy Spirit
descending; for others, it’s that magical moment when a really fine
musician becomes lost in her music and yet remains utterly in control of
its effects on her audience. The woman begins moving in tandem with the
guitar, alternately swaying with it, leaning into it, and rocking it
gently on her hip. At one point, she executes a little jump, high heels
and long dress notwithstanding; at another, she makes a dramatic
circular gesture with her right arm, allowing her hand to stray
promiscuously from the strings for a teasing fraction of a second.
Rapidly finger-picked notes press up against full-on power chords that
linger languidly in the air. She squeezes notes from the high end of the
pitch, relishing the gentle fuzz of distortion, then cajoles the
instrument, commanding, “Let’s do that again!” And so the guitar soars
briefly once more, eventually making a perfect, gentle landing into the
final verse of the song.
The woman in question is Rosetta Tharpe, a vocalist and guitarist of
the Sanctified Church and one of the most remarkable—yet largely
forgotten—musicians of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1930s,
she commenced a colorful career as gospel’s original crossover artist,
its first nationally known star, and the most thrilling and celebrated
guitarist of its Golden Age—so called because it saw the emergence of
the genre’s defining artists, including Mahalia Jackson, whose fame
would eclipse Rosetta’s by the 1950s.
Yet unlike Jackson, whose celebrity developed around her reputation
as a defender of gospel tradition, Rosetta earned notoriety for her
instinct for creative insubordination and her practiced talent for
show-biz flamboyance. From spiritual singing that could bust out in
blues cadences—and, in private, touch on “blue” subjects—to a guitar
virtuosity that set her apart from any other performer of her era,
Rosetta’s particular genius defied categorization. Her music
incorporated elements of gospel, blues, jazz, popular ballads, country,
rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. When she was at the top of her
game, no one could touch her charisma or jaw-dropping talent.
Rosetta’s exuberant self-expression clashed with the prevailing
rhythms of her time, making her the kindred spirit of secular artists
such as blues singer Bessie Smith. And like the persona of Smith’s
celebrated “Young Woman’s Blues,” who also sang about the “long lonesome
road,” Rosetta was often too busy living to settle down. In an age when
church folk looked askance at divorce and shunned blues as the devil’s
music, she fled an unhappy first marriage to a Pentecostal preacher to
become a star in pre–World War II New York. Her ebullient spirit
propelled her out of storefront churches and tent meetings and into
venues such as the Cotton Club, Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater, the
left-leaning nightspot Café Society, and Carnegie Hall. Rosetta played
all of these places, as well as the Grand Ole Opry and arenas, stadiums,
high-school auditoriums, and churches around the country. Her dazzling
guitar playing, which featured a finger-picking style unusual at the
time, indelibly influenced Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis,
Red Foley, Etta James, Little Richard, Bonnie Raitt, Ruth Brown, Isaac
Hayes, and many others.
Before the Clara Ward Singers made gospel singing glamorous, Ro-
setta did gospel programs in sequined gowns and a series of dye jobs or
wigs of different colors—sometimes she was a blonde, sometimes a
red-head—riding grandly into town on her own tour bus. In the socially
conservative 1950s, she staged her nuptials to her third husband in a
baseball stadium in Washington, D.C., entertaining a crowd of tens of
thousands by playing guitar in her wedding dress. She resisted the moral
severity of the Pentecostal Church, while embracing its musical values
of emotional expressiveness. Her 1945 crossover hit “Strange Things
Happening Every Day,” a humorous jab at religious hypocrisy that became a
favorite of Memphis radio announcer Dewey Phillips (and subsequently of
Phillips protégé Elvis Presley), may well be the first rock and roll
song. And while Mahalia made her Newport Jazz Festival debut conditional
on her singing on Sunday morning, with no secular music following her
performance, Rosetta took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in the
summer of 1967 “garbed,” as Anthony Heilbut puts it in The Gospel Sound,“in unfolksy [and unseasonal] mink.”
She was a woman of many guises: she could play the sincere penitent,
the deep spiritualist, the saintly believer, or she could play the
humorous exhibitionist, the uninhibited flirt, the needy child. Just as
she crossed and recrossed the line between secular and sacred sound, so
Rosetta, according to jazz critic Richard Hadlock, could at times cross
“into that territory normally reserved for comico-coquettish
entertainers like Mae West and Pearl Bailey.” No one could accuse her of
disliking the grand gesture, whether histrionic tears or magnanimous,
magnificent expressions of loving-kindness.
Rosetta’s courage to follow her artistic convictions and pursue her
ambitions set her apart from popular musicians on both sides of the
sacred/secular divide. In the racially segregated rural and small-town
communities where most black people lived before World War II, churches
were defining institutions, and ambitious young musicians confronted the
parting of paths between the church and the world as crucial career
turning points. Those who pursued the secular path, from Muddy Waters
and T-Bone Walker to Dinah Washington and Sam Cooke, inevitably paid a
price for their choices in the reproach of the very communities that had
nurtured and applauded their talents. In many cases, becoming a popular
entertainer meant severing ties to these communities—if not
permanently, then until success paved a golden path back into the good
graces of the congregation.
Most African American musicians raised in the church had little
option but to choose, as soul singer Al Green once put it, between
lifting up their voices for God or taking a bow for their third encores.
Rosetta, in contrast, attempted to inhabit an in-between place where
the worlds of religious and popular music intersected and overlapped.
She performed church hymns on secular stages. She breached standards of
holiness and respectability by singing blues and jazz songs about
worldly desires. Even when limiting herself to a church repertoire, she
stuck out as a loud woman: loud in her playing, loud in her personality.
In concert, she combined the spontaneous fervor of religious revivals
with the practiced production values of Broadway variety shows. She
could sing about the evils of worldliness with irreverent pleasure. And
like the best preachers, she was capable of presenting herself as both
larger than life (the furs, wigs, and jewelry) and as her audience’s
equal in human frailty and suffering (no one could say she hadn’t sinned
and paid for it).
Some—especially in the Pentecostal Church—preferred a musician with a
little less swing in her spirituals and schmaltz in her style. Even
secular fans sometimes objected to her theatrics. And yet even Rosetta’s
critics could not but marvel at the extraordinary guitar playing that
became her hallmark as a performer. In that day it was still unusual to
see a woman guitarist, in gospel or in any musical field. Not merely to
play, but to wield the instrument with authority and ease, was to
subvert conven- tion and expectation.
Rosetta exploited her novelty as a “girl guitarist” to its fullest.
Build- ing on skills she had honed since childhood, she played for
maximum visual as well as aural impact, simultaneously dancing the
digits of her right and left hands in a see-if-you-can-do-this display
of dexterity. Most self-accompanying players of the 1930s and ’40s
strummed along to their singing, subordinating the guitar to the vocals,
but Rosetta gave the instrument its own distinct voice. And to be sure
she got an audience’s full attention, she pushed amplifiers to their
ear-splitting limits, challenging anyone to outdo her in volume if not
in flair.
Paradoxically, Rosetta developed her stage persona through a
deep-seated religious faith acquired in childhood. Believing her talents
to be divinely inspired, she saw herself doing God’s work as a popular
musician. It never mattered much to her whether her listeners were
“saved,” only that they got something from her music. Such generosity of
spirit endeared her to an unusually broad audience, including
working-class white and black Southerners, urban jazz aficionados, and
European venerators of the ragtime and blues traditions. Although he
counts Mahalia her artistic superior, “Sister did more than anyone else
in introducing the music of the Negro church to the world,” says gospel
scholar Horace Clarence Boyer.
In hindsight, nearly everything Rosetta accomplished as a musician
seems ahead of its time—sometimes not by years, but by decades. Felled
by a stroke in 1973, when she was fifty-eight, she didn’t have the
opportunity to witness the flowering of soul, although it was a music
she helped innovate through her own experiments in bridging worlds of
sound. Indeed, it’s hard to conceive of as seminal a figure as Elvis,
whose genius similarly lay in his ability to confound the usual
categories, without first imagining Rosetta.
But of course Elvis emerged in a world that venerated the
achievements of white men above all others, while Rosetta was neither
white nor male. Following the trail she blazed, other black women,
including early rock androllers Ruth Brown and Etta James, would
envision the possibility of one day getting up in front of audiences to
sing anything they liked. So fresh has her guitar work remained,
moreover, that, watching one of her rare recorded performances, one has
the impression of witnessing something both temporally distant and
utterly contemporary.
Rosetta’s life would bear out all of the contradictions and tensions
of her song “The Lonesome Road,” a blues she sang in a Sanctified style,
portraying a desire for companionship that attaches itself to objects
both sacred and secular. Her story defies the usual divisions: tragic or
triumphant, self-aggrandizing or self-sacrificing, clay-footed or
transcendent. In the course of a thirty-five-year professional career,
much of it spent on the road, she withstood failed marriages, personal
disillusionment, volatile economic circumstances, racial discrimination,
and rejection by her church. Like so many others, she confronted the
vicissitudes of fame and fortune in a gospel world as rife with
backstabbing, competition, and hustling as any other musical sphere. The
woman who once owned two homes and a Cadillac and required a large shed
to house all of her gowns is today buried in an unmarked grave in
Philadelphia. She combined independence and vulnerability, savvy and
gullibility, sometimes in equal measure. Although she sang about the
wages of sinful living, she pursued romantic relationships—primarily
with men, but occasionally with women—wore pants before they were the
norm for women, and swore like a sailor. She also maintained a lifelong
a‰liation with a church that regarded all of these behaviors as
anathema.
Jim Dickinson, the legendary record producer, recalls what it was
like to discover Rosetta when he was a teenager growing up in Memphis:
“A female gospel singer playing electric guitar in a spangled evening
dress was pretty unique in 1955.” It’s safe to say it is still pretty
unique more than a half-century later.
Related Links
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/sister-rosetta-tharpe-mn0000013511/biography
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
(b. March 20, 1915—d. October 9,-1973)
Artist Biography by Jason Ankeny
Alongside Willie Mae Ford Smith, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is widely acclaimed among the greatest Sanctified gospel singers of her generation; 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. Tharpe was born March 20, 1915 in Cotton Plant, AR; the daughter of Katie Bell Nubin, a traveling missionary and shouter in the classic gospel tradition known throughout the circuit as "Mother Bell," she was a prodigy, mastering the guitar by the age of six. At the same time, she attended Holiness conventions alongside her mother, performing renditions of songs including "The Day Is Past and Gone" and [RoviLink="MC"]"I Looked Down the Line."
[/RoviLink]In time, the family relocated to Chicago, where Tharpe
began honing her unique style; blessed with a resonant vibrato, both
her vocal phrasing and guitar style drew heavy inspiration from the
blues, and she further aligned herself with the secular world with a
sense of showmanship and glamour unique among the gospel performers of
her era. Signing to Decca in 1938, Tharpe became a virtual overnight sensation; her first records, among them Thomas A. Dorsey's
"Rock Me" and "This Train," were smash hits, and quickly she was
performing in the company of mainstream superstars including Cab Calloway and Benny Goodman.
She led an almost schizophrenic existence, remaining in the good graces
of her core audience by recording material like "Precious Lord," "Beams
of Heaven," and "End of My Journey" while also appealing to her growing
white audience by performing rearranged, uptempo spirituals including
"Didn't It Rain" and "Down by the Riverside."
During World War II, Tharpe was so popular that she was one of only two black gospel acts -- the Golden Gate Quartet being the other -- to record V-Discs for American soldiers overseas; she also toured the nation in the company of the Dixie Hummingbirds, among others. In 1944, she began recording with boogie-woogie pianist Sammy Price;
their first collaboration, "Strange Things Happening Every Day," even
cracked Billboard's race records Top Ten, a rare feat for a gospel act,
and one which she repeated several more times during the course of her
career. In 1946, she teamed with the Newark-based Sanctified shouter Madame Marie Knight, whose simple, unaffected vocals made her the perfect counterpoint for Tharpe's
theatrics; the duo's first single, "Up Above My Head," was a huge hit,
and over the next few years they played to tremendous crowds across the
church circuit.
However, in the early '50s Tharpe and Knight cut a handful of straight blues sides; their fans were outraged, and although Knight soon made a permanent leap into secular music -- to little success -- Tharpe
remained first and foremost a gospel artist, although her credibility
and popularity were seriously damaged. Not only did her record sales
drop off and her live engagements become fewer and farther between, but
many purists took Tharpe's
foray into the mainstream as a personal affront; the situation did not
improve, and she 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.
While not a household name like before, she continued touring even
after suffering a major stroke in 1970, dying in Philadelphia on October
9, 1973.
http://www.biography.com/people/sister-rosetta-tharpe-17172332
Biography
American singer Rosetta Tharpe is credited with popularizing gospel music among secular audiences during the 1930s and '40s.
Synopsis
Born in Arkansas in 1915, Sister Rosetta Tharpe began performing as a child with her mother. One of the first gospel artists to perform in both churches and secular clubs, she is credited with bringing gospel music into the mainstream in the 1930s and 1940s. She toured until her death in 1973.
Early Life and Career
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born Rosetta Nubin on March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. Although the identity of her father is unknown, Tharpe's mother, Katie Bell Nubin, was a singer, mandolin player and evangelist preacher for the Church of God in Christ; the COGIC, founded by a black Baptist bishop named Charles Mason in 1894, encouraged musical expression in worship and allowed women to preach. At the encouragement of her mother, Tharpe began singing and playing the guitar from a very young age, and was by all accounts a musical prodigy.
She began performing onstage with her mother from the age of four, playing the guitar and singing "Jesus Is on the Main Line." By age six, she had joined her mother as a regular performer in a traveling evangelical troupe. Billed as a "singing and guitar playing miracle," Rosetta Tharpe accompanied her mother in hybrid performances—part sermon, part gospel concert—before audiences all across the American South.
In the mid-1920s, Tharpe and her mother settled in Chicago, Illinois, where the duo continued to perform religious concerts at the COGIC church on 40th Street while occasionally traveling to perform at church conventions throughout the country. As a result, Tharpe developed considerable fame as a musical prodigy, standing out in an era when prominent black female guitarists remained very rare; blues legend Memphis Minnie was the only such performer to enjoy national fame at the time.
In 1934, at the age of 19, Rosetta Tharpe married a COGIC preacher named Thomas Thorpe, who had accompanied her and her mother on many of their tours. Although the marriage only lasted a short time, she decided to incorporate a version of her first husband's surname into her stage name, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, which she would use for the rest of her career.
Acclaimed Gospel Singer
In 1938, Tharpe moved to New York City, where she signed with Decca Records. On October 31 of that year, she recorded four songs for Decca: "Rock Me," "That's All," "The Man and I" and "The Lonesome Road." The first gospel songs ever recorded for Decca, all four of these recordings became instant hits, establishing Tharpe as one of the nation's first commercially successful gospel singer.
Then, on December 23, 1938, Tharpe performed in John Hammond's famous Spirituals to Swing Concert at Carnegie Hall. Her performance was controversial and revolutionary in several respects. Performing gospel music in front of secular audiences and alongside blues and jazz musicians was highly unusual, and within conservative religious circles the mere fact of a woman performing guitar music was frowned upon. Musically, Tharpe's unique guitar style blended melody-driven urban blues with traditional folk arrangements and incorporated a pulsating swing sound that is one of the first clear precursors of rock and roll. The performance shocked and awed the Carnegie Hall audience. Later Tharpe gained even more notoriety by performing regularly with jazz legend Cab Calloway at Harlem's famous Cotton Club.
During the early 1940s, Tharpe continued to bridge the worlds of religious gospel music with more secular sounds, producing music that defied easy classification. Accompanied by Lucky Millinder's orchestra, she recorded such secular hits as "Shout Sister Shout," "That's All" and "I Want a Tall Skinny Papa." "That's All" was the first record on which Tharpe played the electric guitar; this song would have an influence on such later players as Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley.
All the while, Tharpe kept up a grueling tour schedule, performing her gospel music in churches as well as playing secular clubs. One highlight was a weeklong stint on stage at New York's famous Café Society before racially mixed crowds. Tharpe's considerable crossover appeal was demonstrated during World War II when she became one of only two African American gospel artists to be asked to record "V-Discs" (the "V" stood for "victory") for American troops overseas.
In the mid-1940s, Tharpe scored another musical breakthrough by teaming up with blues pianist Sammy Price to record music featuring an unprecedented combination of piano, guitar, and gospel singing. The duo's two most famous tracks, recorded in 1944, were "Strange Things Happening Every Day" and "Two Little Fishes and Five Loaves of Bread." However, in the face of intense criticism from the religious community, who viewed her jazzy collaborations with Price as the devil's music, Tharpe returned to recording more Christian music later in the 1940s. In 1947, she formed a duet with fellow gospel singer Marie Knight to record such overtly spiritual traditional gospel songs as "Oh When I Come to the End of My Journey," "Stretch Out" and "Up Above My Head" ("I Hear Music in the Air").
Tharpe married Russell Morrison on July 3, 1951. The elaborate ceremony at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., attended by some 25,000 paying audience members, featured a gospel performance by Tharpe in her wedding dress and finished with a massive fireworks display.
In 1953, Tharpe and Knight deviated from the gospel genre to record a secular blues album. The experiment proved disastrous. Not only was the album a commercial failure, it also earned both artists widespread condemnation from the religious community that had provided their most loyal fan base. Tharpe and Knight parted ways shortly after the album's release and neither ever recovered her previous popularity. Tharpe spent the remaining two decades of her career touring Europe and the United States, primarily playing gospel music.
Though she had a much lower profile during these years, Tharpe enjoyed several late-career highlights, including an acclaimed 1960 performance with James Cleveland at the Apollo in Harlem and a 1967 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival.
Death and Legacy
While on a European blues tour with Muddy Waters in 1970, Tharpe suddenly fell ill and returned to the United States. She suffered a stroke shortly after her return and, due to complications from diabetes, had to have a leg amputated. Despite her health woes, Tharpe continued to perform regularly for several more years. In October 1973, however, she suffered a second stroke and passed away days later, on October 9, 1973, at the age of 58, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
One of the most celebrated musicians of all time, Sister Rosetta Tharpe enjoyed a celebrity in the 1940s rarely attained by gospel musicians before or since. "She could play a guitar like nobody else you've ever seen," her friend Roxie Moore said. "People would flock to see her. Everybody loved her." Ira Tucker Jr., the son of the legendary gospel singer Ira Tucker of the Dixie Hummingbirds, put it simply: "She was a rock star."
More than just popular, Tharpe was also groundbreaking, profoundly impacting American music history by pioneering the guitar technique that would eventually evolve into the rock and roll style played by Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Eric Clapton. However, despite her great popularity and influence on music history, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was first and foremost a gospel musician who shared her spirituality with all those who listened to her music. Her epitaph reads, "She would sing until you cried and then she would sing until you danced for joy. She helped to keep the church alive and the saints rejoicing."
http://www.biography.com/people/sister-rosetta-tharpe-17172332
Biography
American singer Rosetta Tharpe is credited with popularizing gospel music among secular audiences during the 1930s and '40s.
Synopsis
Born in Arkansas in 1915, Sister Rosetta Tharpe began performing as a child with her mother. One of the first gospel artists to perform in both churches and secular clubs, she is credited with bringing gospel music into the mainstream in the 1930s and 1940s. She toured until her death in 1973.
Early Life and Career
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born Rosetta Nubin on March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. Although the identity of her father is unknown, Tharpe's mother, Katie Bell Nubin, was a singer, mandolin player and evangelist preacher for the Church of God in Christ; the COGIC, founded by a black Baptist bishop named Charles Mason in 1894, encouraged musical expression in worship and allowed women to preach. At the encouragement of her mother, Tharpe began singing and playing the guitar from a very young age, and was by all accounts a musical prodigy.
She began performing onstage with her mother from the age of four, playing the guitar and singing "Jesus Is on the Main Line." By age six, she had joined her mother as a regular performer in a traveling evangelical troupe. Billed as a "singing and guitar playing miracle," Rosetta Tharpe accompanied her mother in hybrid performances—part sermon, part gospel concert—before audiences all across the American South.
In the mid-1920s, Tharpe and her mother settled in Chicago, Illinois, where the duo continued to perform religious concerts at the COGIC church on 40th Street while occasionally traveling to perform at church conventions throughout the country. As a result, Tharpe developed considerable fame as a musical prodigy, standing out in an era when prominent black female guitarists remained very rare; blues legend Memphis Minnie was the only such performer to enjoy national fame at the time.
In 1934, at the age of 19, Rosetta Tharpe married a COGIC preacher named Thomas Thorpe, who had accompanied her and her mother on many of their tours. Although the marriage only lasted a short time, she decided to incorporate a version of her first husband's surname into her stage name, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, which she would use for the rest of her career.
Acclaimed Gospel Singer
In 1938, Tharpe moved to New York City, where she signed with Decca Records. On October 31 of that year, she recorded four songs for Decca: "Rock Me," "That's All," "The Man and I" and "The Lonesome Road." The first gospel songs ever recorded for Decca, all four of these recordings became instant hits, establishing Tharpe as one of the nation's first commercially successful gospel singer.
Then, on December 23, 1938, Tharpe performed in John Hammond's famous Spirituals to Swing Concert at Carnegie Hall. Her performance was controversial and revolutionary in several respects. Performing gospel music in front of secular audiences and alongside blues and jazz musicians was highly unusual, and within conservative religious circles the mere fact of a woman performing guitar music was frowned upon. Musically, Tharpe's unique guitar style blended melody-driven urban blues with traditional folk arrangements and incorporated a pulsating swing sound that is one of the first clear precursors of rock and roll. The performance shocked and awed the Carnegie Hall audience. Later Tharpe gained even more notoriety by performing regularly with jazz legend Cab Calloway at Harlem's famous Cotton Club.
During the early 1940s, Tharpe continued to bridge the worlds of religious gospel music with more secular sounds, producing music that defied easy classification. Accompanied by Lucky Millinder's orchestra, she recorded such secular hits as "Shout Sister Shout," "That's All" and "I Want a Tall Skinny Papa." "That's All" was the first record on which Tharpe played the electric guitar; this song would have an influence on such later players as Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley.
All the while, Tharpe kept up a grueling tour schedule, performing her gospel music in churches as well as playing secular clubs. One highlight was a weeklong stint on stage at New York's famous Café Society before racially mixed crowds. Tharpe's considerable crossover appeal was demonstrated during World War II when she became one of only two African American gospel artists to be asked to record "V-Discs" (the "V" stood for "victory") for American troops overseas.
In the mid-1940s, Tharpe scored another musical breakthrough by teaming up with blues pianist Sammy Price to record music featuring an unprecedented combination of piano, guitar, and gospel singing. The duo's two most famous tracks, recorded in 1944, were "Strange Things Happening Every Day" and "Two Little Fishes and Five Loaves of Bread." However, in the face of intense criticism from the religious community, who viewed her jazzy collaborations with Price as the devil's music, Tharpe returned to recording more Christian music later in the 1940s. In 1947, she formed a duet with fellow gospel singer Marie Knight to record such overtly spiritual traditional gospel songs as "Oh When I Come to the End of My Journey," "Stretch Out" and "Up Above My Head" ("I Hear Music in the Air").
Tharpe married Russell Morrison on July 3, 1951. The elaborate ceremony at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., attended by some 25,000 paying audience members, featured a gospel performance by Tharpe in her wedding dress and finished with a massive fireworks display.
In 1953, Tharpe and Knight deviated from the gospel genre to record a secular blues album. The experiment proved disastrous. Not only was the album a commercial failure, it also earned both artists widespread condemnation from the religious community that had provided their most loyal fan base. Tharpe and Knight parted ways shortly after the album's release and neither ever recovered her previous popularity. Tharpe spent the remaining two decades of her career touring Europe and the United States, primarily playing gospel music.
Though she had a much lower profile during these years, Tharpe enjoyed several late-career highlights, including an acclaimed 1960 performance with James Cleveland at the Apollo in Harlem and a 1967 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival.
Death and Legacy
While on a European blues tour with Muddy Waters in 1970, Tharpe suddenly fell ill and returned to the United States. She suffered a stroke shortly after her return and, due to complications from diabetes, had to have a leg amputated. Despite her health woes, Tharpe continued to perform regularly for several more years. In October 1973, however, she suffered a second stroke and passed away days later, on October 9, 1973, at the age of 58, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
One of the most celebrated musicians of all time, Sister Rosetta Tharpe enjoyed a celebrity in the 1940s rarely attained by gospel musicians before or since. "She could play a guitar like nobody else you've ever seen," her friend Roxie Moore said. "People would flock to see her. Everybody loved her." Ira Tucker Jr., the son of the legendary gospel singer Ira Tucker of the Dixie Hummingbirds, put it simply: "She was a rock star."
More than just popular, Tharpe was also groundbreaking, profoundly impacting American music history by pioneering the guitar technique that would eventually evolve into the rock and roll style played by Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Eric Clapton. However, despite her great popularity and influence on music history, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was first and foremost a gospel musician who shared her spirituality with all those who listened to her music. Her epitaph reads, "She would sing until you cried and then she would sing until you danced for joy. She helped to keep the church alive and the saints rejoicing."
Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock and Roll
Full Episode
Premiere date: February 22, 2013 | 0:53:09 | Video expires February 21, 2017
VIDEO: <iframe width="512" height="376" src="http://player.pbs.org/viralplayer/2337391461" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" seamless allowfullscreen></iframe>
The life, music and influence of African-American gospel singer and guitar virtuoso Sister Rosetta Tharpe. From writer, producer and director Mick Csaky.
Southern-born, Chicago-raised and New York-made, Sister Rosetta rose from poverty to become one of the world’s most popular gospel singers and the first to cross over successfully into mainstream popular music. She introduced the spiritual passion of gospel into the secular world of rock ’n’ roll, inspiring some of its greatest stars, including Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard.
A natural-born performer and a rebel, “She could play the guitar like nobody else … nobody!” says Lottie Henry, a member of Tharpe’s back-up vocal group The Rosettes.
“Elvis loved Rosetta Tharpe,” attests Gordon Stoker of The Jordanaires, who performed with both Sister Rosetta and Elvis. “Not only did he dig her guitar playing but he dug her singing too.”
The child of poor cotton pickers, Sister Rosetta was born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. At the age of six, she was taken by her evangelist mother Katie Bell to Chicago to join the Church of God in Christ, where she developed her distinctive performing style. In 1938, at the age of 23, she briefly left the church for show business, causing huge controversy when she performed songs laden with sexual innuendo in New York City venues such as the famed Cotton Club and Café Society, where she immediately became a favorite of both Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. However, Sister Rosetta soon returned to her gospel roots and performed in packed churches and theaters throughout America and Europe, becoming one of America’s most distinctive recording stars on radio and television during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
The
film features archival performances and new interviews with musicians,
producers and friends, including Joe Boyd, tour manager of the 1964
American Folk, Blues and Gospel Caravan; Lottie Henry of The Rosettes;
Gordon Stoker of The Jordanaires; Howard Caroll of gospel group The
Dixie Hummingbirds, which toured frequently with Tharpe; Anthony
Heilbut, gospel record producer and writer; life-long friend Roxie
Moore; Ira Tucker, Jr., son of The Dixie Hummingbirds’ Ira Tucker, Sr.;
Tharpe biographer Gayle Wald; and others.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe -Documentary 2011:
Sister Rosetta Tharpe: "That's All":
Rosetta Tharpe - "You Gotta Move":
Sister Rosetta Tharpe - "Ain't No Grave Hold My Body Down":
Sister Rosetta Tharpe - "Nobody knows The Trouble I've Seen" (1961):
Sister Rosetta Tharpe - "Didn't It Rain":
Live Performance of Rosetta Tharpe with 'Didn't It Rain' anno 1964 in
Manchester, England as part of The British Tours of "The American Folk
Blues Festival".
You can buy the whole DVD with the British Tours 1963 to 1966 via
http://www.allmusic.com/album/america...
http://www.amazon.com/American-Folk-B...
Sister Rosetta Tharpe - "Rock Me":
Sister Rosetta Tharpe's recording of Thomas Dorsey's Rock Me for Decca Records
Sister Rosetta Tharpe - "Up Above My Head":
Unknown performance date (appox. the early 1960's) on the show TV Gospel Time with the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church Choir an amazing performance with a Gibson Les Paul SG custom guitar
Sister Rosetta Tharpe - "This Train":
Sister Rosetta Tharpe - "Strange things happening every day":
http://www.b-l-u-e-s.com/sister-rosetta-tharp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Rosetta_Tharpe
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sister Rosetta Tharpe | |
---|---|
Background information | |
Birth name | Rosetta Nubin |
Born | March 20, 1915 Cotton Plant, Arkansas, United States |
Died | October 9, 1973 (aged 58) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
Genres | Gospel, jazz, blues, rock, rhythm and blues[1] |
Occupation(s) | Singer, guitarist |
Instruments | Vocals, guitar, electric guitar |
Years active | 1919–1973[2] |
Sister Rosetta Tharpe (March 20, 1915 – October 9, 1973) was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and recording artist. A pioneer of mid-20th-century music, she attained popularity in the 1930s and 1940s with her gospel recordings, characterized by a unique mixture of spiritual lyrics and rhythmic acompaniment that was a precursor of rock and roll. She was the first great recording star of gospel music and among the first gospel musicians to appeal to rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll audiences, later being referred to as "the original soul sister" and "the godmother of rock and roll".[1][3][4][5][6] She influenced early rock-and-roll musicians, including Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.[5][7][8]
Willing to cross the line between sacred and secular by performing her music of "light" in the "darkness" of nightclubs and concert halls with big bands behind her, Tharpe pushed spiritual music into the mainstream and helped pioneer the rise of pop-gospel, beginning with her 1939 hit "This Train".[1] Her unique music left a lasting mark on more conventional gospel artists, such as Ira Tucker, Sr., of the Dixie Hummingbirds. While she offended some conservative churchgoers with her forays into the pop world, she never left gospel music.
Tharpe's 1944 hit "Down by the Riverside" was selected for the National Recording Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress in 2004, which noted that it "captures her spirited guitar playing and unique vocal style, demonstrating clearly her influence on early rhythm-and-blues performers" and cited her influence on "many gospel, jazz, and rock artists".[9] ("Down by the Riverside" was recorded by Tharpe on December 2, 1948, in New York City, and issued as Decca single 48106.[10]) Her 1945 hit "Strange Things Happening Every Day", recorded in late 1944, featured Tharpe's vocals and electric guitar, with Sammy Price (piano), bass and drums. It was the first gospel record to cross over, hitting no. 2 on the Billboard "race records" chart, the term then used for what later became the R&B chart, in April 1945.[11][12] The recording has been cited as precursor of rock and roll.[7]
Contents
Childhood and early career
She was born Rosetta Nubin in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, to Katie Bell Nubin and Willis Atkins, who were cotton
pickers. Little is known of her father, except that he was a singer.
Tharpe's mother, Katie Bell Nubin, was also a singer and a mandolin
player, evangelist, and preacher for the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), which was founded in 1894 by Charles Harrison Mason, a black Baptist
bishop, who encouraged rhythmic musical expression, dancing in praise
and allowing women to preach in church. Encouraged by her mother, Tharpe
began singing and playing the guitar as Little Rosetta Nubin at the age
of four and was cited as a musical prodigy.[1][2][4]
By age six, Tharpe had joined her mother as a regular performer in a
traveling evangelical troupe. Billed as a "singing and guitar playing
miracle," she accompanied her mother in performances that were part
sermon and part gospel concert before audiences across the American
South.[2]
In the mid-1920s, Tharpe and her mother settled in Chicago, Illinois,
where they performed religious concerts at the COGIC church on 40th
Street, occasionally traveling to perform at church conventions
throughout the country. Tharpe developed considerable fame as a musical
prodigy, standing out in an era when prominent black female guitarists
were rare.[13]
In 1934, at age 19, she married Thomas Thorpe, a COGIC preacher, who
accompanied her and her mother on many of their tours. The marriage
lasted only a few years, but she decided to adopt a version of her
husband's surname as her stage name, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.[2] In 1938, she left her husband and moved with her mother to New York City. Although she married several times, she performed as Rosetta Tharpe for the rest of her life.
Recording career
On October 31, 1938, aged 23, Tharpe recorded for the first time – four sides for Decca Records, backed by Lucky Millinder's jazz orchestra.[14] The first gospel songs ever recorded by Decca, "Rock Me," "That's All,"
"My Man and I" and "The Lonesome Road" were instant hits, establishing
Tharpe as an overnight sensation and one of the first commercially
successful gospel recording artists.[2] "Rock Me" influenced many rock-and- roll singers, such as Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. In 1942, the music critic Maurie Orodenker, describing Tharpe's "Rock Me", wrote that "It's Sister Rosetta Tharpe for the rock-and roll spiritual singing."[15]
She had signed a seven-year contract with Reminder and was managed by
Mo Galye. Her records caused an immediate furor: many churchgoers were
shocked by the mixture of gospel-based lyrics and secular-sounding
music, but secular audiences loved them. She played on several occasions
with the white singing group the Jordanaires.[8]
Tharpe's appearances with the jazz artist Cab Calloway at Harlem's Cotton Club in October 1938 and in John Hammond's
"Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall on December 23, 1938,
gained her more fame, along with notoriety. These performances, which
both shocked and awed the crowds, were controversial as well as
revolutionary in several respects. 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 in such settings was frowned upon. For these reasons, Tharpe fell
out of favor with segments of the gospel community.[2][16]
Her recordings of "This Train" and "Rock Me", which combined gospel
themes with bouncy up-tempo arrangements, were hits in the late 1930s
with audiences having little previous exposure to gospel music.
It has been suggested Tharpe had little choice in the material she
was contracted to record with Millinder. "Rosetta and Millinder were
increasingly at odds in 1943, as Rosetta itched to quit the big-band
circuit and renew her career as a strictly gospel act. As Roxie Moore
remembers, she hadn't wanted to do light fare poking fun at old-time
religion or worldly material like "Tall Skinny Papa", but found herself
bound by contractual obligations."[17]
Her nightclub performances, in which she would sometimes sing gospel
songs amid scantily clad showgirls, caused her to be shunned by some in
the gospel community.[16]
Tharpe continued recording during World War II, one of only two gospel artists able to record V-discs for troops overseas.[18] Her song "Strange Things Happening Every Day", recorded in 1944 with Sammy Price, Decca's house boogie woogie pianist, showcased her virtuosity as a guitarist and her witty lyrics and delivery. It was the first gospel song to make Billboard's Harlem Hit Parade (later known as Race Records, then R&B)
Top Ten, an achievement she would accomplish several more times in her
career. This 1944 record has been credited by some as being the first rock and roll record.[19] Tharpe toured throughout the 1940s, backed by various gospel quartets, including the Dixie Hummingbirds.
In 1946 Tharpe saw Marie Knight perform at a Mahalia Jackson
concert in New York. Tharpe recognized a special talent in Knight. Two
weeks later, Tharpe showed up at Knight's doorstep, inviting her to go
on the road. They toured the gospel circuit for a number of years,
during which they recorded hits such as "Up Above My Head" and "Gospel Train".[20]
Tharpe was so popular that she attracted 25,000 paying customers to her
wedding to her manager, Russell Morrison (her third marriage), followed
by a vocal performance at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., in 1951.
Their popularity took a sudden downturn, however, when they recorded
several blues songs in the early 1950s. Knight attempted afterward to
cross over to popular music, while Tharpe remained in the church but was
rebuffed by many of her former fans.[18] In 1957, Tharpe was booked for a month-long tour of the UK by British trombonist Chris Barber.
In April and May 1964, at the height of a surge of popular interest
in the blues, she toured Europe as part of the Blues and Gospel Caravan,
alongside Muddy Waters and Otis Spann, Ransom Knowling and Little Willie Smith, Reverend Gary Davis, Cousin Joe, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Tharpe was introduced on stage and accompanied on piano by Cousin Joe Pleasant.[21] Under the auspices of George Wein, the Caravan was stage-managed by Joe Boyd.[22] A concert, in the rain, was recorded by Granada Television at the disused railway station at Wilbraham Road, Manchester, in May 1964. The band performed on one platform while the audience was seated on the opposite platform.
Later life and death
Tharpe's performances were curtailed by a stroke in 1970, after which
one of her legs was amputated as a result of complications from diabetes.[23] On October 9, 1973, the eve of a scheduled recording session, she died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as a result of another stroke. She was buried in Northwood Cemetery in Philadelphia.[24]
Later recognition
A resurgence of interest in Tharpe's work has led to a biography, several NPR segments, scholarly articles, and honors. The United States Postal Service issued a 32-cent commemorative stamp to honor Tharpe on July 15, 1998.[25] In 2007, she was inducted posthumously into the Blues Hall of Fame.
In 2008, a concert was held to raise funds for a marker for her grave,
and January 11 was declared Sister Rosetta Tharpe Day in Pennsylvania.[26] A gravestone was put in place later that year,[27] and a Pennsylvania historical marker was approved for placement at her home in the Yorktown neighborhood of Philadelphia.[27] In 2011 BBC Four aired a one-hour documentary, Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock & Roll, written and directed by UK filmmaker Mick Csaky. In 2013 the film was shown in the US as part of the PBS series American Masters.[28]
The film has been repeated numerous times in the UK and US, most
recently in March 2015 to mark the 100th anniversary of Tharpe's birth.
On March 20, 2015, the UK newspaper The Guardian published a 100th-birthday tribute by Richard Williams.[29]
Musical influence
Musically, Tharpe's unique guitar style blended melody-driven urban
blues with traditional folk arrangements and incorporated a pulsating
swing sound that is one of the first clear precursors of rock and roll.[2]
Little Richard
referred to the stomping, shouting, gospel music performer as his
favorite singer when he was a child. In 1947, she heard Richard sing
prior to her concert at the Macon City Auditorium and later invited him
on stage to sing with her; it was Richard's first public performance
outside of the church. Following the show, she paid him for his
performance, which inspired him to become a performer.[30] When Johnny Cash
gave his induction speech at the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, he referred
to Tharpe as his favorite singer when he was a child. His daughter Rosanne Cash stated in an interview with Larry King
that Tharpe was her father's favorite singer. Tharpe began recording
with electric guitar in the 1940s, with "That's All", which has been
cited as an influence on Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley.[2] Other musicians, including Aretha Franklin, Jerry Lee Lewis,[7] and Isaac Hayes,
have identified her singing, guitar playing, and showmanship as an
important influence on them. She was held in particularly high esteem by
UK jazz/blues singer George Melly. Tina Turner credits Tharpe, along with Mahalia Jackson, as an early musical influence. Such diverse performers as Meat Loaf, Neil Sedaka and Karen Carpenter
have attested to the influence of Tharpe in the rhythmic energy she
emanated in her performances (Carpenter's drum fills are especially
reminiscent of Tharpe's "Chorlton Chug").[31] Later artists, such as Sean Michel, have credited her influence with the performance of gospel songs in more secular venues.
The Brixton band Alabama 3 named a track after Tharpe on their debut album, Exile on Coldharbour Lane (1997), and recorded a version of her song "Up Above My Head". In 2007, the UK indie rock band the Noisettes released the single "Sister Rosetta (Capture the Spirit)", from their album What's the Time Mr. Wolf? Also in 2007, Alison Krauss and Robert Plant recorded a duet version of the song "Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us", written by Sam Phillips. Phillips released her version of the song on her 2008 album, Don't Do Anything. Michelle Shocked opened her live gospel album ToHeavenURide (2007) with "Strange Things Happening Every Day", along with a tribute to Tharpe.
In 2001, the French film Amélie
included a scene showing the protagonist's house-bound neighbor
mesmerized by a montage of video clips that featured a performance of
"Up Above My Head" by Tharpe.
In 2014 the Canadian film Félix et Meira
included about one minute of Tharpe singing "Didn't It Rain" from the
video of Tharpe's 1964 concert at the Wilbraham Road railway station.
Discography
Albums
- The Lonesome Road, Decca 224 (1941)
- Blessed Assurance (1951)
- Wedding Ceremony of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Russell Morrison, Decca DA-903 (1951)
- Gospel Train (1956)
- Famous Negro Spirituals and Gospel Songs (1957)
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe, MGM E3821 (1959)
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Omega OSL31 (1960)
- Gospels in Rhythm (1960)
- Live in 1960 (1960)
- The Gospel Truth with the Bally Jenkins Singers (1961)
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Crown LP5236 (1961)
- Sister on Tour (1962)
- Live in Paris (1964)
- Live at the Hot Club de France (1966)
- Negro Gospel Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Hot Gospel Tabernacle Choir and Players (1967)
- Precious Memories, Savoy 14214 (1968)
- Singing in My Soul, Savoy 14224 (1969)
Her complete works up to 1961 were issued as seven double-CD box sets by the French label Frémeaux & Associés.[32]
Chart singles
Year | Single | Chart Positions |
---|---|---|
US R&B[11] |
||
1945 | "Strange Things Happening Every Day" | 2 |
1948 | "Precious Memories" | 13 |
"Up Above My Head, I Hear Music in the Air" | 6 | |
1949 | "Silent Night (Christmas Hymn)" | 6 |
Tributes
References
- "Complete Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Volume 7". Frémeaux & Associés (in French). 2015. Retrieved March 23, 2015.
Bibliography
- Boyer, Horace Clarence (1995). How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel. Elliott and Clark. ISBN 0-252-06877-7.
- Heilbut, Tony (1997). The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times. Limelight Editions. ISBN 0-87910-034-6.
- Wald, Gayle (September 2003). "From Spirituals to Swing: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Gospel Crossover". American Quarterly 55 (3): 387–416.
- Wald, Gayle (2007). Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-0984-9.
- White, Charles (2003). The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography. Omnibus Press. p. 17.
External links
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe at the Internet Movie Database
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock & Roll, written and directed by Mick Csaky, PBS, American Masters, January 9, 2013
- The Gospel of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, National Public Radio, All Things Considered, January 17, 2004
- Interview with Tharpe biographer Gayle F. Wald, WILL-AM radio, February 22, 2007
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Etched in Stone at Last, National Public Radio, All Things Considered, March 20, 2009
- Pop Music, Wisconsin Public Radio, To the Best of Our Knowledge, April 1, 2007, rebroadcast March 24, 2008
- Premier Guitar – Forgotten Heroes: Sister Rosetta Tharpe