Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Crossin' Over

Scott McLemee reminds me that I ought to do a post about Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973). If you don't know how awesome she was, look and listen to her rendition of"Down By the Riverside." She was born at Cotton Plant, Arkansas, to Katie Bell Nubin, a traveling evangelist for the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the largest of the African American pentecostal denominations. At four, she began singing at revivals and continued doing so when the family moved to Chicago in the great migration. Both in the South and in Chicago, she was influenced by the blues and jazz, singing them in private, but restricting herself to gospel music in public until she began recording in the mid-1930s. Her mix of sacred and secular music scandalized much of her American audience over the next two decades. See, for example, her 1941 performance of"Lonesome Road" with Lucky Millinder's band. In 1944, she was performing in Macon, Georgia, when she heard twelve year old Little Richard sing her hit,"Strange Things Happening Every Day," and invited him to join her onstage.

On that last great Judgment Day
When they drive them all away
There are strange things happening every day.

In 1951, 25,000 paying fans attended her [third] wedding and performance at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC. Sister's aisle led from the dugout to second base. In the mid-1950s, she moved to Europe and her popularity here never fully recovered. Yet, Bob Dylan remembered her:

She was shameless, the singer remembered: purer than pure when her mother was alive, backsliding after that. She came onto the Lord's stage in a mink; she had a way with a guitar few men could touch. She was the black church in the Grand Old Opry--she'd even recorded with Pat Boone's father-in-law, Red Foley, Mr."Old Shep" himself. On the other hand, Red Foley had recorded"Peace in the Valley," hadn't he, the spiritual the Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey had written as the Second World War began? The sainted gospel composer, in earlier days known as Georgia Tom, who'd put his name on dirty blues? The singer shook his head; why was he remembering all this? His memory raced ahead of him. For some reason he remembered that"Strange Things Happening" had topped the black charts the same week Hitler killed himself. It was April 30, 1945; the singer was a month short of four, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was thirty."There's something in the gospel blues," she would say years later,"that's so deep the world can't stand it." Now he heard the song as if the war had ended yesterday, as if it were the first time he'd heard it, wherever that had been--off some road he'd never remember anything else about, like waking from a dream you had to get up and live through.

NPR's All Things Considered did a good retrospect,"The Gospel of Sister Rosetta Tharpe," with musical excerpts ("Didn't It Rain,""That's All,""Strange Things Happening Everyday") to which you can listen. There you'll learn that -- it wasn't Oprah in 1986, but -- Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1959 who was the first black woman to host a television show, TV Gospel Time. Nat King Cole bested her by only three years. Biographies of Tharpe include: Gayle Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (2003); and Jerma A. Jackson, Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age (2004).