Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Godmother of Rock & Roll

In memory of a woman of ‘firsts’

Until 2007, like many of her African American contemporaries, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was an unsung hero not only of the musical influencers’ club, but for her unrelenting preparedness and vigour in breaking through barriers of gender, race and religion.   

Rosetta Nubin was born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, on 20th March 1915, to cotton pickers, Katie Bell Nubin and Willis Atkins. Katie Bell Nubin (nee Harper), who, despite her arduous life as a mother working on the cotton plantations in Arkansas, was in her own right a singer and accomplished mandolin player, deaconess, missionary and woman speaker for the Church of God in Christ.  

As a child prodigy, from her humble beginnings and inspired by her mother, Rosetta attended the Church of God in Christ, where she followed the Pentecostal black Bishop, Charles Harrison Mason’s, practice of encouraging female worshipers not only to teach, but to exude rhythmic musical expression, dancing in praise and singing. At the grand old age of 4, ‘Little Rosetta Nubin’ had started to play the guitar and sing. By the age of 6, promoted as the “singing and guitar playing miracle” she was performing with her mother to Southern church audiences as part of a traveling evangelical troupe.   

During the Great Migration of the 1920’s, like many African-American musicians, including Blanche and Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Adelaide Hall, Thomas A Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, Katie Nubin moved with Rosetta to Chicago, where they continued to perform religious and gospel concerts both in Chicago and across the country.

In 1934, Rosetta married her first husband, Thomas Thorpe, a preacher at the Church of God in Christ. Having already established her position as a sacred musical prodigy, she joined in the fun of Chicago’s swinging Jazz and Blues scene, where Rosetta honed her innate talents further when she crossed over to play to secular audiences. It was a brave move that later led to much criticism of her work from the church. In 1938, Rosetta left her husband and headed for the Big Apple, where she reinvented herself as Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

In October of the same year, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Cab Calloway, who by then was the Godfather of Hi-De-Ho, performed at Harlem’s Cotton Club where Cab’s residency had earned him good standing amongst his peers, agents, producers, record companies and aspiring African American artists. Sister Rosetta’s show-stopping performances with Cab didn’t go unnoticed, landing her a seven-year deal with Chicago’s great Lucky Millinder and his jazz orchestra. By the end of that month they had recorded four songs for Decca Records, entitled ‘Rock Me’, ‘That’s All, ‘My Man and I’ and ‘The Lonesome Road’. ‘Rock Me’ became an instant hit, escalating her into new-found gospel stardom. As the renowned Billboard magazine critic, Maurie Orodenker, noted when he described her hit ‘Rock Me’ as being “Rock-and-Roll spiritual singing”.

In December 1938, accompanied by the prodigious pianist of ‘boogie-woogie’, Albert Ammons, she was invited to play at Carnegie Hall where her performance in John Hammond’s concert, ‘Spirituals to Swing’, catapulted her career further.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s career continued to blossom during the early 1940’s and, in 1943, both the all-male African- American Golden Gate Quartet and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, recorded V-Discs for US troops serving abroad. She was the first and only African American woman to do so.

Her new found fame and admiration came with a price tag in the form of a creeping notoriety amongst those members of her sacred audiences that had begun to shun her for playing what they believed was the “devils’ music” to secular audiences. It was during this time that she had considered returning to her sacred gospel roots but had been prevented from doing so as a result of her contractual obligations.

Despite her emotional dichotomy, Rosetta’s steely determination prompted her to continue breaking barriers. Hiring the Jordanaires, an all-white male gospel quartet, she crossed over another milestone, this time breaking the racial barrier that had prevented whites and minority races performing together.

The mixture of her unique mezzo-soprano vocals, encapsulating several genres, including blues, pop-gospel, jazz and soul, coupled with her inimitable rock and roll style when playing her much loved Gibson guitar, was something to behold. In 1944, her recording, ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’, with Decca’s in-house boogie-woogie pianist, Sammy Price, was described as a masterpiece It hit No 2 of Billboard’s Harlem Hit Parade in 1945. Not only was it the first gospel song to be charted in the top 10; it was the first rock and roll song to chart.

In 1946, Rosetta attended the upcoming gospel singer and prominent civil rights activist, Mahalia Jackson’s, concert at Harlem’s Golden Gate Ballroom, where she was struck by the contralto voice of a young Marie Knight. The story is that Rosetta approached Ms Knight a couple of weeks after the show and invited her to become part of her tour. For several years, the duo toured the country and recorded several hits including ‘Beams of Heaven’, ‘Gospel Train’, ‘Didn’t it Rain’ and ‘Up Above My Head’, which reached No 6 in the 1948 US R& B charts. The harmonizing, piano and guitar playing duo happily toured without men.

The duo’s popularity started to dwindle when new chart-topping performers hit the tour circuit during the latter part of the 1940’s. However, it wasn’t until 1950, when tragically Marie lost her two children in a fire at her mother’s home in New Jersey, that the duo parted company.

Rosetta got married for a second time to gospel booking agent, Forrest Allen. From the limited accounts of this union, it would appear that the marriage was short-lived, and they divorced in 1950.

That same year, Rosetta met up with concert promoters in Washington DC who convinced her they would revive her career by pulling off a stunt that would catapult her back into the spotlight. This PR antic involved Rosetta performing both sacred marriage vows with nuptials that followed in the form of a spiritual concert.  Rosetta signed a contract to take part the following year in this showbiz extravaganza, on the condition that she found a man to marry!

In preparation for the wedding, Rosetta sought to buy her wedding dress from a well- known department store, Thalhimer’s, in Richmond, Virginia. This was because she had been arrested at the store a couple of years earlier when she tried to purchase a fur coat with cash that the store assistants believed had been ill-gained. In addition, during the 40’s and early 50’s, women of colour couldn’t try clothes on or make a purchase off the rack. This time, after purchase of the $800 dress, Thalhimer’s sent the dress in its own car with a fitter, a white woman from Richmond, to Rosetta so the dress could be personally fitted. Was this another first?                    

On 3rd July 1951, fulfilling her contractual obligations, Rosetta pulled off the most ‘elaborate wedding ever staged’ when she married her then manager, Russell Morrison, at the Griffith Stadium in Washington DC, in front of an estimated 15,000 paying guests. The concert went down a storm too, covered by all the major African American press of the time, and Rosetta’s name was back in the headlines. Yet again, Rosetta broke all barriers to be one of the first female performers to fill a stadium.

After recording an album in 1956 with the Harmonizing Four gospel quartet, entitled ‘Gospel Train’, Rosetta landed a month-long tour in the UK with British trombonist Chris Barber. 

By 1964, Rosetta was touring Europe with a plethora of renowned musicians and performers, including Muddy Waters and Otis Spann, as part of the American Folk-Blues Festival, where aptly, on a rain-drenched platform at Manchester’s Wilbraham Road defunct train station, she performed a sensational rendition of her hit ‘Didn’t it Rain’, while her young enthusiastic audience sat on the opposite platform in awe

Rosetta continued to record and tour until 1970, when owing to complications relating to her diabetic condition, one of her legs was amputated. In true Rosetta style, she continued to record until she suffered a stroke that resulted in her untimely death in Philadelphia on 9 October 1973.

Her contributions to gospel and blues music remained unacknowledged by the music industry until her eventual induction into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2007.

In 2008, after a concert to raise money for a gravestone to mark her grave, Governor Rendell of Pennsylvania, in recognition of this remarkable woman’s contributions to both the music industry and civil liberties, declared the 11 January as ‘Sister Rosetta Tharpe Day’.

Rosetta; was and has remained an influence on many successful musicians. During one of Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theatre ‘guitar battles’, Rosetta had been told that she “could play like a man”. To which her resounding retort was “Can’t no man play like me. I play better than a man”. As history would accept, she wasn’t wrong.

To name but a few of those she influenced, from Elvis Presley to Bob Dylan, to Chuck Berry to Little Richard, Carl Perkin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner and countless others, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the ‘Godmother’ that inspired them all!

Little Richard’s gratitude towards Rosetta shines through his autobiographical account of her influence on him when he was just 14 years of age. She had encouraged him to become a professional performer after she had heard him singing one of her songs before a gig at the Macon City Auditorium, Georgia, and invited him to open her show for which she paid him $20. The rest, shall we say, is history!

Elvis Presley, as a young boy was so inspired when he heard her playing and singing on WELO’s daily half hour of black gospel; that he’d rush home from school each day so as not to miss the show.  As Gordon Stoker, a member of Elvis’ backing group, the Jordanaires, reminisced when interviewed; “Elvis loved Sister Rosetta, especially her incredible guitar style…………That’s what really attracted Elvis; her pickin’. He liked her singing, but he liked that pickin’ first, because it was so different.”

Chuck Berry described his lifelong career as being “one long Sister Rosetta Tharpe impersonation.”

On his Theme Time Radio Hour Show, Bob Dylan aired his admiration for this vivacious female ‘musician’s musician’ when he stated; “Sister Tharpe was anything but ordinary and plain, she was a big, good-looking woman, and divine, not to mention sublime, and splendid. She was a powerful force of nature. A guitar-playing, singing evangelist.”

On 13 December 2017, the ‘Godmother of Rock and Roll’, who, for over half a century after her death, had failed to be acknowledged for her unsurpassable talents and contribution to the birth of Rock and Roll, was finally inducted into the ‘ Early Influencers’ category of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In recognition of Rosetta’s life time achievements, Lonnie Liston Smith, accomplished jazz, soul/funk keyboard player and son of Lonnie Smith of the Harmonizing Four gospel quartet, stated “She was playing rock ‘n’ roll way before anyone else… that was way before Chuck Berry and all those guys. Nobody else had even come up with something like that.”

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the ‘Godmother of Rock and Roll’, is undoubtedly a woman of many ‘Firsts’, whose place in history should never be forgotten.