Sister Rosetta Tharpe: First Lady of Rock

LINK TO: Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe


The career of “Sister” Rosetta Tharpe embodies many of the themes endemic to American popular music, authenticity, gender mediation, the impact of technology on the creation and distribution of music, and race mediation.

Rosetta Tharpe was raised within the Pentecostal tradition which regarded music as a way of achieving religious ecstasy. Gospel music audiences expected their singers to be “clean and untarnished by the world” (Wald, 139). Songs were expected to be spiritual and spirit filled, a gospel song was to be, “a sermon set to music”. Rosetta Tharpe could perform within this milieu, but like many other gospel performers faced the dilemma of limiting her options (and income) or crossing over to perform secular music as well. Performers such as Tharpe, and Sam Cooke “crossed over”, while others such as Mahalia Jackson and Dorothy Love Coates, “could not relate to (secular) music”. Mahalia Jackson was embraced as the preeminent Gospel singer because of her authenticity. Gospel audiences were skeptical about Rosetta Tharpe’s sincerity as a spiritual entertainer because she also performed secular music.

There was room for skepticism. Rosetta’s personal life suggests that while she may have been willing to placate audiences and offer up a public persona somewhat matching their expectations, in private she was a woman with the type of “will to power” associated only with men during that period. Rosetta was a hard living woman with a string of husbands and some say at least one woman lover (the later being an unforgivable sin to conservative Christian audiences). In her professional career she was a domineering force (to the chagrin of men), outplaying men on the guitar ( the “man’s instrument”) and issuing orders authoritatively to subordinate males (reversing the “natural order” of things).

Rosetta pragmatically adapted her career to meet changing circumstances. Starting in gospel music, she crossed over to secular blues music as the size of radio and television audiences eclipsed the size of gospel audiences. In the early 1950s she was not afraid to record with country music idol Red Foley. In 1958, as Britain and Europe embraced American black musicians, Rosetta quickly discovered the value of “folk credentials” (bestowed on her a decade earlier by Alan Lomax). “If ‘folk’ was the rage among a record buying public of earnest young people, then ‘folk’ she would be” (Wald, 175).Sister Rosetta Tharpe played the game, and played to win.

The unintended consequences of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s larger than life career are musically telling. She had a tremendous influence on young British musicians who, in turn, would re-interpret American black music and re-introduce it to mainstream American audiences. The British invasion together with the heavily Gospel/Blues influenced music of Elvis Presley put black music and style at the center of American popular music, “but the conduit(s) of these new sounds and styles did not have to be black” (Wald, 145).

My titles on Amazon

My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.

Escaping the Delta - Book Review

The sub-title of Elijah Wald’s book is "Robert Johnson and the invention of the blues". Wald suggests that it is the audience that gives meaning to music, and that to understand music as a cultural artifact, you must understand what broader purpose the music serves for a specific audience. The blues meant something entirely different to its original black audience than to white aficionados of the 1960s, 1970s, and thereafter who reshaped blues to meet their own tastes.

The blues originated in the black community with “songs improvised to match a life of hard labor and constant troubles” . Vaudevillian “Ma Rainey” opened up a new future for the blues by taking songs from the field to the stage. Mamie Smith started a blues craze when she recorded “Crazy Blues” in 1920. A host of female singers dominated the blues being performed throughout the 1920s. Blues was seen as an entertaining pop style, not a vehicle for transmitting black culture. Blacks were not nostalgic for the past. Wald points out, for its original black audiences , “Blues was the music of the present and future, not the oppressive plantation past” (Wald, 80). The performance of blues was dominated by big name female stars, and the market as long as the audiences were predominantly black, according to record executive Marshall Chess, was a “women’s market”.

Wald’s central thesis is that the observer gives meaning to what is being observed. The observer provides the meta-narrative. The career of Robert Johnson exemplifies the thesis. Johnson was a talented musician who produced a small body of work and died dramatically at an early age. In his lifetime, Johnson vied for popularity and was an example of someone holding his own “with the pop stars up north, rather than being stuck forever playing in run down country shacks” (Wald, 127). Johnson was all but forgotten until crowned “King of the Delta” in the 1960s by white middle class blues aficionados embracing the vision of a romanticized black culture of the past which reflected an “otherness” in opposition to white middle class norms. In the years between Johnson’s death in 1938 and his recognition as “King of the Delta”, blues music had been redefined. It was first redefined by Alan Lomax and John Hammond, as decisive musical opinion makers for a small bubble of New York liberal society which embraced the blues as a badge of otherness. Blues had left the realm of its original black audience. Obscurity had become a virtue. “The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958” (Wald, 241).

The second re-definition came with the British musical invasion of the 1960s. “Slashing guitar and wailing harmonica” spoke to English musicians, who re-educated Americans on the meaning of the blues. White audiences were now seeking emotional release, raw, direct passion found lacking in white styles (Wald, 257). Johnson’s persona, as much as his music, propelled his rise to blues icon. As a person, he was seen as mysterious, dangerous and otherworldly…with the added benefit of having died young before his full potential could be realized. Johnson exemplified “the lifestyle that white listeners (associated) with the music: a homeless wanderer, alone in the world, haunted by demons, destroyed by violence” (Wald, 263). The blues image for white, predominantly male audiences, was that of hard bitten machismo. Paradoxically, while his white fans drank straight whiskey to get in the blues mood, an authentic master performer of the blues, Muddy Waters, drank only French champagne (Wald, 258).

My titles on Amazon

My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.

Romancing the Folk by Benjamin Filene: Review

In Romancing the Folk, Benjamin Filene traces the development of the folk music movement since 1900. His primary focus is the cultural “middlemen”, who discovered folk musicians and promoted them as exemplars of America’s musical roots. These individuals made judgments about what constituted America’s true musical traditions, helped shape what “mainstream” audiences recognized as authentic, and inevitably, transformed the music that the folk performers offered. (Filene, 5)

What is fascinating about these cultural brokers is how their endeavors reflect one of the ongoing themes in American history, the dichotomy between the vision of man in society versus the vision of the noble savage, the individual in a simpler more natural time. The earliest folklorists were bent on cataloging and preserving original songs. These early catalogers saw the propagation of folk culture as a means of knitting society back together and restoring it to a simpler era. John and Alan Lomax went farther, recording the sounds of authentic performers and introducing authentic performers to the public.

Industrial development in America increasingly diminished the autonomy of the individual in favor of the demands of industrial discipline. Technology forced the worker into what the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) called, “a common servitude of all workers to the machines which they tend”. Disillusioned with bourgeois culture’s corrupt materialism and constraining standards of propriety folklorists depicted roots musicians as the embodiments of an anti-modern ethos. The appeal of folk performers to the public was their non-middleclass “otherness”. In his public persona Huddie Ledbetter (aka “Lead Belly”), an ex-convict singer John and Alan Lomax brought to public attention, was cast as an archetypal ancestor, pre-modern, emotive, non-commercial. The “outsider” was the persona expected of the folk performer, even though many of the performers themselves, including “Lead Belly” and “Muddy Waters” ( McKinley Morganfield) were both willing and anxious to adapt their music to be more commercially viable.

During the great national crises of the Depression and the Second World War, the folk music movement was officially embraced by the government as a method of enhancing national pride and cohesion. Folk songs were identified with Americanism. The ruling elite used a cultural tool to energize crowds to identify with the prevailing ideology of the elite. After the war, the official embrace of folk music faded and folk music resumed its role as an activity of “otherness”.

One of the primary forces in the folk movement in the post-war years was Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger and his followers, constituted an early wave of the 1960s counterculture, pushing against the empty homogeneity of bourgeois life. Interestingly the two most influential figures in the folk movement, Seeger and Bob Dylan were not, in fact, of the working class. Seeger was the son of privilege, the product of elite eastern prep schools, and Harvard. Dylan (Robert Zimmerman)was the product of a conventional middle class family from Minnesota. Both donned working class clothes and developed an ersatz working class lifestyle, despite background and income, rejecting even bathing and hygiene in a quest for “authenticity”.

In many ways both Seeger, Dylan, and the folk movement can be seen as part of the tradition of the nineteenth century utopianism, hankering after a simpler and nobler American community.

My titles on Amazon

My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.