Easily one of the most overlooked artists of the 20th century, Sister Rosetta Tharpe paved the way for rock-n-roll artists long before rock-n-roll was a concept. Not only was she one of the first women to play the electric guitar, but she was one of the earliest rock stars who paved the way for the whole genre. She was using voice growl distortions and doing dramatic guitar performances when Elvis was just a toddler, yet for a long time she was overlooked in the conversations of rock-n-roll pioneers. Sister Rosetta Tharpe has openly been referenced as inspiration by so many icons, from Little Richard who openly raved about her performance changing his life to Beyoncé name dropping her in her song ‘Break my Soul - The Queen’s Mix’. So why is one of the founders of the genre, who inspired globally renowned artists not equally famous in the public’s memory? Let’s look at sister Rosetta Tharpe, the queer black trailblazer who pioneered the rock-n-roll revolution decades before any men came into the scene.
(To best understand and connect with her sound, here’s a Spotify playlist: beginners guide to Sister Rosetta Tharpe!)
Born March 20th, 1915, Rosetta Tharpe (born Rosetta Nubin) was born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. While both her parents were cotton pickers, her mother was both a preacher and a singer in the Church of God in Christ. At the time, black women preachers were practically unheard of, so we can thank this level of exposure to music and gospel to heavily influencing Tharpe so deeply. From a young age, she was extremely gifted at music, singing and playing guitar by age four. By six years old, she was already playing under the stage name Little Rosetta Nubin. She joined her mother in a traveling evangelical group across the American South, becoming well known among the southern gospel community where they travelled.
After traveling, they settled in Chicago. This is where she developed her style of music, fusing blues, jazz and gospel music to create her distinct sound. Not only was she one of the few black woman guitarists, but her use of distortion on the guitar was ground-breaking and surprised audiences wherever she played. At 19, she married Thomas Tharpe, a preacher from the church she grew up in. While the marriage didn’t last, she adopted her husband’s surname as her stage name and ultimately created her name as we know it now, ‘Sister Rosetta Tharpe’. Her strong and distinctive voice and guitar playing paired with her electric guitar made for extremely unconventional gospel music, which both attracted certain crowds and isolated others. By 1938, she performed at the historic Cotton Club Revue, which had seen the likes of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. For most of the white audience members, her performance was the first time seeing a black woman perform, let alone perform her genre bending guitar routines. She released her first single ’Rock Me’ at 23, which fused gospel with rock’n’roll rhythms and tempos. Her first single made her a commercial success and she became one of the first commercially successful gospel singers.
Not only was being a female guitarist in a male dominated industry, being a black woman in a predominately white industry was extremely difficult, and she had to fight nonstop to reach the level of fame that she achieved. Tharpe performed a couple of times with the Jordanaires in the early 1940s, where she had to deal with institutional segregation and racism while traveling from city to city. On tour, hotels would refuse her entrance, so Tharpe would have to sleep on buses. Restaurants didn’t allow her to eat inside so she would go to the back end of the restaurant to eat outside while performing to mixed audiences.
Institutionalized racism wasn’t the only hardship she endured. Her approach to gospel music was very unconventional at the time, combining religious and secular music styles to make her own sound. Her music was a fusion of gospel and rock n roll, and this translated into her guitar style, but also her lyrics. Her first single “Rock Me” openly praised her love and sexuality, which left gospel audiences to feel scandalized by her music. In the chorus, she sings, “You hold me in the bosom/Till the storms of life is over/Rock me in the cradle of our love/Only feed me till I want no more”. The chorus can be both interpreted as a reference to a lover or to her religion. Even though it seems tame by our standards, the double entendre in the lyrics was quite scandalous for the gospel community, and new for the secular community, making the marriage between the two in her lyrics radical. Her most famous song “Strange Things Happening Everyday”, had references to historic moments of the 1940s, from the end of WW2 to Jackie Robinson becoming the first black MLB player. In this song, she seamlessly translated the experience of living in the 1940s into her music, which made her especially popular among black WW2 soldiers. This song became the first gospel song to reach the mainstream charts.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe continued being true to herself through her music and personal expression, never changing her sounds or her persona to accommodate mainstream music at the time, or the expectations of her as a black gospel singer, which can and should be seen as revolutionary. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was openly bisexual within the music industry in the 1940s, when bisexuality was seen as a cardinal sin, especially within the gospel community. While her music always had a gospel core, many of her songs were an open praise to her sexuality. In 1946, Sister Rosetta Tharpe saw Marie Knight perform at a concert in New York, and two weeks later began performing together on tour. The duo would perform together until 1950 as the two became creative and romantic partners. Several biographical accounts described how they didn't hide their sexuality from people except their audience, and that their relationship was an open secret within the music industry. Unfortunately, their rumoured relationship was a big topic discussed among gospel circles with no confirmation due to attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community at the time, but now we can look back and praise her for her unabashed queerness in and outside her music. Not many people highlight her bisexual identity as a part of her legacy, but it's central to her personal musical evolution and the larger evolution of the rock genre.
With the decline of gospel music and the rise of predominantly white male rock genre, her popularity began to wane. Sister Rosetta Tharpe still performed to loyal niche audiences, specifically with British audiences, where she had a mini resurgence in her career after touring with black Blues icons around England until she tragically passed away at 53 years old in 1973 from a stroke and was buried in Philadelphia.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s legacy is such an important one in the context of music history, but only in recent years has she been receiving her deserved accolades for effectively being the first gospel and rock star. Her guitar techniques alone inspired Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley’s guitar styles. Johnny Cash even cited her as one of his earliest heroes at his rock-n-roll induction speech. She inspired a whole host of legendary musical icons outside of rock-n-roll, with Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner citing her as a key vocal and performance influence. You’d expect someone as monumental to have a biopic, or books written about them. Even though she was one of the biggest gospel stars and had gospel and rock legends several rock legends praise her, her grave was unmarked for over thirty years. The most recognition she had received until the early 2000s was a 32 cent commemorative US postal service stamp (which is not the flex they thought it was) in 1998. In 2007, she was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, which started a gentle revival of her name and legacy. Over the years, news publications would from time to time do a short special on her, but it wasn’t until 2018 that she would be recognized for her early influence in rock-n-roll.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was finally inducted in the rock-n-roll Hall of Fame in May 2018, which was celebrated with several tribute performances performed by talented black artists, like Felicia Collins and Questlove. Sister Rosetta Tharpe even had a short appearance in the recent Elvis biopic, which may not be entirely the accolades she deserves, but is a start to the flowers and accolades that this queer black icon deserves.
Further Reading:
Diaz-Hurtado, Jessica. ‘Forebears: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Godmother of Rock “N” Roll’. NPR, 24 August 2017, sec. Music.
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/544226085/forebears-sister-rosetta-tharpe-the-god mother-of-rock-n-roll. Accessed 07/07/2023
Hermes, Will. ‘Why Sister Rosetta Tharpe Belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’. Rolling Stone (blog), 13 December 2017.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/why-sister-rosetta-tharpe-belong s-in-the-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame-123738/. Accessed 07/07/2023
‘Queer, Black & Blue: Sister Rosetta Tharpe Is Muva of Them All’. AFROPUNK, 7 March 2019.
https://afropunk.com/2019/03/rosetta-tharpe/. Accessed 07/07/2023
✂️ Johnny Cash Cites Sister Rosetta Tharpe as His Earliest Hero. Accessed 23 July 2023. https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkxz6lLQRNCRioARVhyDTuplb3k9-0C6QZP.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Rock Me. Lonesome Road, 1938.
Wald, Gayle. Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007. Accessed 07/07/2023