Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Rosetta Nubin was born on March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, a small farming town in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta region ^[1]. Her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, picked cotton, played the mandolin, and served as an evangelist and singer in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), a Pentecostal denomination founded in the 1890s that, unusually for the era, encouraged musical expression in worship and allowed women prominent roles as preachers and performers ^[2].

The child proved a prodigy. By most accounts she was performing in church by the age of four, billed as a singing and guitar-playing miracle, and by six she was appearing alongside her mother in a traveling evangelical troupe ^[1]. The pair worked church conventions and revival meetings across the South, where the young Rosetta absorbed the rhythmic intensity of Pentecostal worship along with the blues sounds that surrounded her outside the sanctuary ^[2].

In the mid 1920s mother and daughter settled in Chicago, joining the Great Migration of Black southerners to northern cities. There Rosetta continued performing in COGIC settings while hearing the jazz and blues that flourished on the city's South Side ^[1]. The mixture stayed with her: a sacred repertoire delivered with a secular swing, and a guitar technique that owed as much to blues players as to church tradition ^[3].

In 1934, at nineteen, she married Thomas Thorpe, a COGIC preacher who had traveled with the family act. The marriage was short and unhappy, but a version of his surname stuck: she performed for the rest of her life as Sister Rosetta Tharpe ^[1].

The decisive break came in 1938, when Tharpe moved to New York City and did something almost unthinkable for a church singer: she joined the floor show at the Cotton Club in Harlem, performing gospel numbers for cabaret audiences alongside Cab Calloway's orchestra ^[2]. That same year she recorded four sides for Decca Records, including "Rock Me" and "That's All," which became immediate hits and made her one of the first commercially successful gospel recording artists ^[3]. On December 23, 1938, she appeared at John Hammond's landmark "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall, sharing a bill that presented Black sacred and secular music to a largely white concert audience ^[2].

Her choices scandalized parts of the church world. Many COGIC congregants viewed nightclubs as territory no gospel performer should enter, and Tharpe spent much of her career negotiating the tension between her sacred material and her secular venues ^[4]. The controversy did little to slow her rise. During the early 1940s she toured and recorded with the big bands of Lucky Millinder, singing numbers such as "Shout, Sister, Shout," and she was one of only two gospel artists to record V-Discs for American troops during the Second World War ^[3].

Any account of Sister Rosetta Tharpe achievements begins with "Strange Things Happening Every Day," recorded in 1944 with the boogie-woogie pianist Sammy Price. The record reached number two on Billboard's race records chart in April 1945, making it the first gospel record to cross over to that chart's upper reaches, and its rocking backbeat and stinging electric guitar lines have led many historians to name it among the earliest recordings that point directly toward rock and roll ^[3].

Tharpe's guitar playing set her apart as much as her voice. She adopted the electric guitar early, favoring heavy distortion and single-note runs at a time when few popular performers, and almost no women, played lead guitar at all ^[4]. In 1947 she heard a young Little Richard sing before her concert in Macon, Georgia, and invited him on stage, an encouragement he recalled for the rest of his life ^[2]. Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins all listened closely to her records, and Cash named her a favorite singer in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech ^[4].

Her partnership with the contralto Marie Knight, begun in 1946, produced some of gospel's most popular duets, including "Up Above My Head," and the two toured to packed houses across the country ^[1]. In 1951 Tharpe staged her third wedding, to her manager Russell Morrison, as a paid public event at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., drawing an audience reported at well over 20,000 people, with a concert following the vows ^[2].

Tharpe married three times. Her first marriage to Thomas Thorpe ended in the early 1940s; a second, to Foch Allen in 1943, was also brief; her 1951 marriage to Russell Morrison lasted until her death ^[1]. She had no children, though she remained close to her mother, who often appeared on her programs playing mandolin and singing ^[2].

Biographer Gayle Wald has documented that Tharpe's private life was more complicated than her church billing suggested, including accounts from associates of relationships with women, a subject Tharpe never discussed publicly in an era when doing so was impossible for a gospel star ^[2]. On the road she faced the routine indignities of segregation: barred from hotels and restaurants across the South, she and her troupe often slept and ate on her customized tour bus ^[4].

Those who worked with her described a generous, funny, commanding presence, a performer who wore furs and drove fine cars while singing about salvation, and who saw no contradiction in doing both ^[2].

The 1950s brought a shift in fortunes. A 1953 decision to record secular blues material damaged her standing with gospel audiences, and the rise of younger stars such as Mahalia Jackson, along with the very rock and roll she had helped to seed, pushed her toward the margins of American popular music ^[4].

Europe revived her career. She toured the United Kingdom and the Continent repeatedly from 1957 onward, embraced by audiences caught up in the British blues and gospel revival ^[3]. Her most celebrated European appearance came in May 1964, when the Blues and Gospel Caravan tour, which also featured Muddy Waters and Otis Spann, was filmed by Granada Television at a disused railway station at Wilbraham Road in Manchester. Tharpe performed "Didn't It Rain" from one platform to an audience seated on the other, in light rain, a broadcast later cited by British musicians of the generation that followed ^[4].

Her health declined in her final years. She suffered a stroke in 1970, and complications of diabetes led to the amputation of a leg, though she continued to perform when she could ^[1]. On the eve of a scheduled recording session she suffered a second stroke, and she died in Philadelphia on October 9, 1973, at the age of 58. She was buried at Northwood Cemetery in Philadelphia, where her grave remained unmarked for decades until fans and musicians funded a headstone in 2008 ^[2].

For years after her death Tharpe was a musician's musician, revered by performers and largely absent from popular histories of rock and roll. That began to change with Gayle Wald's 2007 biography Shout, Sister, Shout!, a 2011 BBC documentary, and a growing body of scholarship on women and Black artists in the music's origins ^[2]. In 2018 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted her with its Early Influence Award, an honor presented by Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes ^[5].

Other recognition followed and preceded it. Pennsylvania declared January 11, 2008, Sister Rosetta Tharpe Day. The United States Postal Service had already placed her on a 32-cent gospel singers stamp in 1998, and in 2019 she was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame ^[3]. Musicians from Bonnie Raitt to Frank Turner have recorded tributes, and her Manchester railway platform performance circulates widely online as a demonstration of her guitar command late in life ^[4].

The basic Sister Rosetta Tharpe facts explain the durability of her reputation: she electrified gospel music, carried it into secular spaces against fierce resistance, and played lead guitar with a drive that younger men built careers upon. Any full Sister Rosetta Tharpe biography ends where the music does, with a performer now routinely called the godmother of rock and roll ^[5].