Sister Rosetta Tharpe (part 1)

Yes, it looks like rock music was invented by a woman. (Some material here is taken from my earlier posts on the origins of Rock music.)

Before the Beginning….

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born in 1915.  Her legal birth name is unknown, not a rare situation for the poor and for Black people in the early post-reconstruction South.  Her parents were cotton pickers and active members of their local church, where they sang and played gospel music.  Rosetta was musically talented, and as a child she joined her mother on evangelical tours, singing and playing guitar (then, as now, a rare thing for girls to do).  She married a preacher, Thomas Thorpe, while still a teenager.  Though she divorced him only a few years later, she kept his name with a slight modification, and became Sister Rosetta Tharpe.  She performed under that name for the rest of her life.

The Beginning

Throughout the 1930’s, Tharpe continued touring and performing Gospel music, but she also began playing non-religious venues, and added in a mix of other musical styles and lyrics.  Her most important innovations were to take gospel rhythms and add blues tropes, a distorted electric guitar, and foot-stomping beats, creating something that would become rock and roll. She became widely popular, both within the gospel circuit, and then more broadly. 

Her popularity led to her signing with a major record label, but one of the conditions was that she continue doing secular music, often written for her by the studio songwriters.  This led to some controversial recordings, but they helped her became a major star.  Throughout her career, she continued to perform Gospel music, mixed in with this new thing she was inventing. 

Tharpe had both white and black fanbases, but often could only perform for one or the other at a time because many venues were segregated.  Her recordings in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s were breakthroughs in many ways—a black artist crossing over to white audiences, a woman playing electric guitar with an unheard-of aggressive edge, and an entire new genre of music that would become the dominant form of popular music for much of the world.   

Rock and roll came to be dominated by white boys in the 1950’s (with a brief but short-lived resurgence of women, mostly white, in the 1970’s), so we’ve largely forgotten its origins in Black music. Even less well known is that its first practitioner was a woman—a queer, Black woman, no less.

“This Little Light of Mine”

Who invented the rock guitar solo? Here is some of the earliest footage of what we would call the modern electric guitar solo, complete with the swagger.  From Chuck Berry to the Stones and Led Zeppelin, they all owe a big thank you to Sister Rosetta. 

“Up Above my Head”

While faced with all of the awfulness of pre-civil rights era racism and sexism, Sister Rosetta Tharpe did have one advantage: she was positioned as a gospel singer.  In that world, women were accepted in leading roles, and a dominant stage presence wasn’t frowned on, it was the norm.  There was no one to tell her “girls don’t play guitar” because, frankly, no one, male or female, had played the way she did.  While she was certainly considered unique, she wasn’t thought of as a pioneer until much later, because no one anticipated that this new kind of music would take over the world. 

“Didn’t it Rain?” 

This is from a British production in 1964, during a revival of interest in American blues and soul music in Europe. The headliners were Tharpe and Muddy Waters.  Among the people attending this concert were the young Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Brian Jones and Keith Richards, all of whom were just starting to make their mark on the British music scene. The American musicians later talked about how strange it was, while traveling in Europe and England, not to have to stay in separate hotels or eat in separate facilities. 

Stay tuned for more on Sister Rosetta Tharpe!