Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Happy Birthday, Sister Rosetta Tharpe 1915-1973...Tharpe is widely held as one of the the greatest gospel performers of her generation. A flamboyant performer who forayed into blues and swing, she shocked purists with her leap into secular music and inspired countless rock and roll guitar players with her windmill guitar strokes and blues stylings.

Born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, she began playing guitar at age 4 and became proficient enough to perform along side her mother, a traveling missionary, at tent revivals throughout the south. When her family moved to Chicago in the late 20's she practiced the blues and jazz she had been exposed to on her travels in private, bending the notes and picking the guitar like Memphis Minnie. She only performed gospel music in public.

She married Thomas Thorpe, a preacher described as a "tyrant" in 1934 but left him and moved to New York with her mother four years later. In 1938 she recorded four sides for Decca with Lucky Millinder which became overnight hits but caused a furor among her church-going audience with their mix of sacred and secular music. She had originally signed a 7 year contract with Millinder with the understanding she would only do gospel music but that request wasn't honored. Tharpe found herself singing songs that often offended her gospel audience with their suggestive lyrics, shocking them further still by sharing a stage with scantily clad showgirls. But the recordings were an enormous hit with the secular audiences, introducing many of them to the gospel sound for the first time.

She was one of only two gospel artists who recorded V-discs for the troupes during WW2. Her recording of "Strange Things Happening Every Day" in 1944 with boogie-woogie pianist Sammy Price was the first gospel song to make Billboard's Harlem Hit Parade Top Ten and is considered by some to be the first rock and roll record. Tharpe's biographer, Gayle Wald put it this way, "If this woman was doing this in the 1940's, then you have to go back and re-write the whole story of rock-and-roll, and rock-and-roll guitar playing specifically."

After Tharpe broke with Millinder she went back to singing more spiritual music, teaming up with another gospel singer, Marie Knight whose more subdued style was excellent counterpoint to Tharpe's theatrics. They recorded many popular records and toured the gospel circuit successfully together for several years. Tharpe's popularity was so great that when she married her manager, Russell Morrison at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C she attracted 25,000 paying customers, some bringing gifts, and played her guitar in her wedding dress from center field.

Her popularity took a downturn in the early 50's when the women recorded several blues songs, once again offending the church-going audience who perceived blues and guitar playing as the devil's music. Tharpe then toured Europe through the 60's where her following was still strong but she would never regained her popularity in the United States. Even though she was sited by many early rock-and-roll musicians as a primary influence (Elvis, Johnny Cash, Little Richard and Gerry Lee Lewis among them) her contributions to music, and contemporary guitar playing in particular, were virtually forgotten by the general public at the time of her death in 1973.