Before I dive into this post, let's first view a color clip of Sister Rosetta Tharpe (I'm unable to embed the clip here, I'm afraid, so please just click on the link above).
A couple of weeks ago, reader Martin Colyer emailed images of Tharpe with trumpeter Ken Colyer, his late uncle, taken by photographer Terry Cryer in the late 1950s while Tharpe was on tour in Britain. Martin hosts the wonderful blog Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week (go here).
Here are three images of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Ken Colyer by Terry Cryer, courtesy of Martin Colyer...
I can think of only one artist who stands at the junction of jazz, gospel, R&B and rock 'n' roll, and that would be Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Louis Jordan certainly would come close, but I give Tharpe the edge because of her gospel roots and her pioneering attack on the electric guitar, which begins to eclipse the saxophone as a lead instrument starting in 1955.
Tharpe's records in the 1940s and early 1950s had a profound influence on leading rock 'n' roll guitarists like Chuck Berry while her singing deeply swayed soul and R&B singers from the same period. Tharpe died in 1973 at age 58. Here's a BBC documentary on Tharpe that will tell you all you need to know...
by NPR Staff
For some, it's an expression of faith; to others, it's an important element of culture. But whatever its meaning, gospel music helped create the foundation for rock 'n' roll, as well as rhythm and blues. Singers like Sam Cooke, Al Green and Aretha Franklin all began by singing gospel music, and Anthony Halbent has captured some of gospel's greatest moments in a new DVD and CD collection titled How Sweet It Was: The Sights and Sounds of Gospel's Golden Age.
According to Halbent, Sam Cooke moved the sacred style of gospel into a more secular arena, with his group The Soul Stirrers. "Sam Cooke took into soul music, which he practically invented himself, the sound and the harmonies of The Soul Stirrers," Halbent says. Sister Rosetta Tharpe Michael Ochs Archives/Stringer/Getty Images
Cooke wasn't the only singer to spread gospel to a secular audience. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, considered to be the original female rocker, influenced the likes of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. "She was sidewinding long before Pete Townshend was conceived," Halbent says. "People often thought that Chuck Berry was combining, conflating, country and blues, but in fact we know that Rosetta had come up with the sound almost 20 years earlier." The influential figures don't stop there. The DVD features a song from Marion Williams about the healing power of God.
"Marion Williams was the greatest influence in people like Little Richard, James Brown and Otis Redding," Halbent says. "These were some of the most impressive showmen or performers in America. [Williams'] 'Something Within' may have been the first gospel song. You hear an awful lot of American culture and American history in this one performance."
The collection is filled with American cultural history, featuring 26 songs on the CD and 27 performances on the DVD. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127215402&ft=1&f=10002
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