Pinpointing the birth of rock ‘n’ roll isn’t an exact science. Its sprawling roots create a tangle that makes any claim to primacy a bit suspect, but Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s influence looms large. She’s been called “the godmother of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Born Rosetta Nubin on March 20, 1915, Tharpe was a gospel powerhouse in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, taking gospel mainstream and influencing the generation of musicians who birthed rock ‘n’ roll.
In 1947, a teenage Richard Penniman sang one of the gospel star’s songs to her before a show at the Macon City Auditorium. She invited him to sing with her and later gave him a little cash for his trouble. It was Little Richard’s first public performance outside of church, and you can hear Tharpe’s influence in the stomping, roof-raising tumult the rock ‘n’ roll legend created and in his very secular take on Tharpe’s inspirational holler.
Elvis Presley was a fan, too. In the 2007 biography “Shout, Sister, Shout!,” the Jordanaires’ Gordon Stoker (who worked with both Tharpe and Presley) tells author Gayle Wald, “Elvis loved Sister Rosetta.”
It would be hard to imagine that Chuck Berry wasn’t influenced by her fiery, amp-punishing guitar style. Tina Turner, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis have all acknowledged her influence. Former Carolina Chocolate Drops member Rhiannon Giddens included Tharpe’s “Up Above My Head” on her acclaimed 2015 album “Tomorrow Is My Turn.”
Tharpe’s popularity waned in the 1950s, but the British blues boom of the early 1960s brought renewed interest in her music and she played to enthusiastic crowds on the other side of the Atlantic. She suffered a stroke in 1970, had a leg amputated due to complications from diabetes and succumbed to a second stroke on Oct. 9, 1973.
In 2011, BBC Four aired a one-hour documentary, “Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock & Roll,” which eventually aired on the PBS series “American Masters” in 2013. The producers unearthed a radio clip of Bob Dylan singing her praises, “She was a powerful force of nature, a guitar-playing, singing evangelist.”
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