Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Up Above My Head

Hearing Sister Rosetta Tharpe for the first time was a revelation. I couldn't believe that a guitar player of her caliber had slipped under my radar for so long. I began subscribing to Guitar Player Magazine in the early 1970s and I devoured every issue, reading each copy from cover to cover and back again. So many musicians that I had never heard before...radio in rural Eastern Kentucky was not good...and I wanted to hear them all. Discovering public radio not long after my subscription started helped a little in the classical and jazz music realms, but there was so much more out there. I developed a taste for music that was (and still is) darn near insatiable. I began reading more as I started building out my record, and later cassette tape, and later still, CD collections. As I moved to different places in the country, I found more music at different stations. And then came the Internet. Jackpot.

And yet, no one told me about Sister Tharpe. That took public television a few years back, and then YouTube. Boy, I'd missed a lot.

Here's how Open Culture describes "The Godmother of Rock and Roll," and the process of bringing her back:

Sure, Keith Richards borrowed some of his best licks from Chuck Berry. But do you know who Chuck Berry borrowed from? Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Tharpe was one of the pioneers of 20th century music, a flamboyant, larger-than-life figure who fused gospel and blues into something new. “Listen to her recordings,” said singer-songwriter Joan Osborne, “and you can hear all the building blocks of rock and roll.” Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash each named Tharpe as one of their fondest childhood influences. “Sister Rosetta Tharpe was anything but ordinary and plain,” said Bob Dylan on his radio program. “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.”

Yet despite the enormity of her influence, Tharpe has been virtually forgotten by the mainstream culture. For many years following her death in 1973, she lay in an unmarked grave. In the last decade, though, there has been a slow resurgence of appreciation for Tharpe. In 2004 Osborne, Maria Muldaur, Bonnie Rait and other artists joined together for a tribute album called Shout, Sister, Shout! A biography of the same name, by Gayle Wald, was published in 2007. And in 2011–the same year Tharpe’s grave finally received a headstone, thanks to a fundraising concert– filmmaker Mike Csaky directed a documentary called The Godmother of Rock & Roll: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, which aired this February on PBS as part of the American Masters series.

Here's more from The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture:

"Sister Rosetta" Tharpe (1915–1973)
aka: Rosetta Nubin Tharpe

Arkansas native Rosetta Nubin Tharpe was one of gospel music’s first superstars, the first gospel performer to record for a major record label (Decca), and an early crossover from gospel to secular music. Tharpe has been cited as an influence by numerous musicians, including Bob Dylan, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Arkansan Johnny Cash.

Rosetta Nubin was born in Cotton Plant (Woodruff County) on March 20, 1915, to Katie Bell Nubin, an evangelist, singer, and mandolin player for the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). No mention is found of her father. Nubin began performing at age four, playing guitar and singing “Jesus Is on the Main Line.” By age six, Nubin appeared regularly with her mother, performing a mix of gospel and secular music styles that would eventually make her famous. As a youth, she could sing and keep on pitch and hold a melody. Her vocal qualities, however, paled beside her abilities on the guitar—she played individual tones, melodies, and riffs instead of just strumming chords. This talent was all the more remarkable because, at the time, few African-American women played guitar.

Nubin’s guitar style was influenced by her mother’s mandolin playing, pianist Arizona Dranes, and composer Florence Price, with whom Rosetta studied in Cotton Plant. She also sang the popular hymns of the day, including the compositions of bluesman turned gospel musician Thomas A. Dorsey. Indeed, elements of the blues are readily apparent in Nubin’s guitar styling. Later, Nubin’s music would be influenced by her work with jazz greats Lucky Milliner and Cab Calloway.

Billed as the “singing and guitar-playing miracle,” Nubin was an added attraction at her mother’s church services. Both mother and daughter worked as members of an evangelistic troupe that worked throughout the South before arriving in Chicago, Illinois, in the late 1920s. There they became part of the growing Holiness movement, a late nineteenth-century offshoot of the Pentecostal denomination which, in the 1890s, led to the formation of COGIC and other new religious groups.

After all these years, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is finally getting the recognition she deserves. It makes one wonder about all the other unsung and under-sung artists out there who weren't as lucky.

But maybe that luck can change for a few of them, too. We may find another great musician and performer that still has the power to change lives.

Also see:
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Film: The Godmother of Rock & Roll
PBS American Masters