Sister Rosetta Tharpe

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Hymie
Running Up That Hill
Posts: 3330
Joined: Sat Jun 08, 2013 10:37 pm

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Post by Hymie »

The following is the text of an article from the Daily Beast website,
essentially claiming that Sister Rosetta Tharpe invented rock & roll.
There are strange things happening every day, for sure, so this is worth
a read, I think. The Chuck Berry quote later in the article strikes me
as very un-Chuck-like and I'd like to know its source.


It’s Time to Celebrate the Black Women Who Invented Rock and Roll
MAKING HISTORY
Black women like Sister Rosetta Tharpe were doing rock and roll before
it had a name, and they deserve to be recognized in the same household
way as the men who followed suit.

Kali Holloway
Updated May. 16, 2021 5:00AM ET / Published May. 14, 2021 11:59PM ET

OPINION

It should be common knowledge that Black women invented rock and roll.
Memphis Minnie, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, Bessie Smith and Sister
Rosetta Tharpe should be names known as widely as those of the men who
came after them, especially the white boys who have been canonized and
made infinitely wealthy for biting their style.

Instead, even as they’re cited in the annals of musicology and
name-checked by music nerds, these Black women innovators are still far
less famous than the musicians they influenced, and rock and roll writ
large is almost always raced and gendered as white and male. But it’s
Black women who laid the foundation of a musical powerhouse that racism
and sexism vaingloriously settler-colonized.

Their talents are captured on “race records,” where Black music was
relegated before it was columbused and repackaged for white consumption.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe—a queer Black woman from Cotton Plant, Arkansas,
who performed to Pentecostal church crowds by age 4, and was billed as
the “Singing and Guitar Playing Miracle” by age 6—reworked gospel hymns
into secular hits before “crossover” was even a thing.

In 1938, after performing at New York City’s Apollo Theater and becoming
a featured regular at the Cotton Club Revue, Tharpe recorded “Rock Me,”
a revised take on the holy spiritual “Hide Me In Thy Bosom.” “Won’t you
hear me swingin’,” the opening line on Tharpe’s version, was a sonically
small but lyrically meaningful tweak from the original’s “singing,” and
Tharpe growled the word “rock” on the chorus—turning it into a song that
hinted at pleasures of the flesh.

But it’s Tharpe’s guitar playing, more subdued and acoustic on her early
tracks, electrified and pushed to the forefront by the time of her
recordings in the late 1940s, in addition to her tremendous vocals, that
mark her as a truly extraordinary musical vanguard and visionary.
Dressed in heels, “sequined gowns and a series of dye jobs or wigs of
different colors—sometimes she was a blonde, sometimes a redhead,”
Tharpe would belt out jumped-up versions of gospel songs and play out
guitar solos that seem to channel the divine.

Watching Tharpe riff, run and bend notes—and you really should literally
watch—is to witness what is unquestionably rock and roll’s first
blistering incarnation.

Tharpe would use the Jordanaires, an all-white outfit that had been
mainstays at the Grand Ole Opry, as her backing band. The group would
later go on to play with Elvis Presley, who member Gordon Stoker said
revered Tharpe’s “pickin’. He liked her singing, but he liked that
pickin’ first—because it was so different.”

Chuck Berry reportedly once said that his entire career was “one long
Rosetta Tharpe impersonation,” and Johnny Cash cited her as his favorite
singer of all time. “Say man, there’s a woman who can sing some rock and
roll,” Jerry Lee Lewis told music critic Peter Guralnick in an
interview. “I mean, she’s singing religious music, but she is singing
rock and roll. She jumps it. She’s hitting that guitar, playing that
guitar, and she is singing. I said, ‘Whoooo. Sister Rosetta Tharpe.’”

“All this new stuff they call rock and roll, why, I’ve been playing that
for years now.”
— Sister Rosetta Tharpe
And Bob Dylan called Tharpe “a powerful force of nature, a
guitar-playing singer and evangelist,” noting that there were “a lot of
young English guys who picked up the guitar after getting a look at her.”

In 1957, Tharpe reportedly told the Daily Mail, “All this new stuff they
call rock and roll, why, I’ve been playing that for years now.” And
nothing could’ve been more true. Yet somehow, the Black woman who was
making rock and roll decades before white dudes who studied and lifted
her swag, was described in a 1970 review as “so rhythmically exciting
that when she accompanies herself on guitar she might be a blacked-up
Elvis in drag.”

Tharpe died in 1973, and her gravestone remained unmarked until 2008. If
toxic white supremacist misogynoir were capable of being shamed, the
fact that Tharpe’s name was nearly whitewashed from rock history until
decades after her death—she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of
fame in 2018, years after many of those she inspired—would be one reason
among many.

It might follow the near-erasure of Memphis Minnie, the “Queen of the
Blues” who with Kansas Joe McCoy recorded the original 1929 recording of
“When the Levee Breaks”—one of the few songs well-established
plagiarists Led Zeppelin bothered to cite as the original singer on
their modified cover version.

Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton got paid a measly $500 for her
multi-million-selling 1953 hit “Hound Dog,” a deep and gritty track that
was sanitized just three years later by Elvis Presley. Writer-musician
Francesca Harding writes that “in the documentary Gunsmoke Blues, Big
Mama Thornton recounts her team’s attempts to get her and Elvis on the
same bill to perform Hound Dog together. Unsurprisingly, Elvis’ camp
refused.”

Even rock and roll’s whole sex and drugs accoutrements were in place
long before the genre’s most oft-cited stories of debauchery made the
rounds. There are plenty of blues artists who sang about both, but
Lucille Bogan’s “dirty blues” tracks—“B.D. Woman’s Blues,” (the B.D. is
for “bulldagger” or “bull dyke”), Sloppy Drunk Blues among them—were
almost exclusively about sex and more.

On “Shave ‘em Dry” she sings ”Now if fuckin' was the thing/That would
take me to heaven/I'd be fuckin’ in the studio/Till the clock strike
eleven/Oh daddy, daddy shave ‘em dry/I would fuck you baby/Honey I'd
make you cry.” That same songs includes the lyric “I got somethin’
between my legs’ll make a dead man come,” which Mick Jagger references
near the very end of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.”

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that’s only
true when the imitation is recognized as such. Black women were doing
rock and roll before it had a name, and they deserve to be recognized in
the same household way as the men who followed suit.

“Blues is just the theatrical name for gospel,” Sister Rosetta Tharpe
told a British fan back in 1960, “and true gospel should be slow, like
we start off with “Amazin’ Grace”...Then you clap your hands a little
and that’s ‘jubilee’ or ‘revival’...and then you get a little happier
and that’s jazz... and then you make it like rock ’n’ roll.”
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