SISTER ROSETTA THARPE
Live In France: The 1966 Concert In Limoges
DEEP DIGS/ELEMENTAL MUSIC
9/10 Long-buried tapes of a gospel great.
STANDING on the platform of a disused railway station in south Manchester one cold and damp day in the spring of 1964, wearing a voluminous winter coat, a curly blonde wig and a white Gibson SG guitar, Sister Rosetta Tharpe attempted to repel the elements by delivering a rousing version of the gospel song “Didn’t It Rain” to an audience of young white people seated, appropriately enough, on the other side of the tracks. The presence of a Granada TV crew, for whom her performance in the American Folk Blues Festival – along with those of Muddy Waters and the Reverend Gary Davis – was mounted, provides later generations with a lasting record of how Tharpe, born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas in 1915 and raised in the Church of God in Christ, could make the most of any environment.
Aged six, she had performed gospel songs to an audience of hundreds, and soon she was learning how to accompany herself on the guitar. In New
York in 1938 she appeared at Carnegie
Hall in the rst of John Hammond’s two historic “From Spirituals to Swing” concerts, subtitled “An Evening of
African American Negro Music”, representing sacred music alongside such secular performers as the pianist James P Johnson and the Count Basie Orchestra. At the start of the 1940s she moved temporarily to the secular side and sang with Lucky Millinder’s big band, whose R&B foreshadowed rock’n’roll.
Returning to her gospel roots, she switched to the electric guitar, which cut through better when she performed with church choirs. In 1951 she was married (to her third husband) during a show in a Washington DC baseball stadium, in front of 25,000 people. And in 1957, at the behest of Chris Barber, she arrived in Europe, encountering audiences whose enthusiasm would lure her back many times before a stroke forced her into retirement in 1970, followed by her death three years later.
Those European tours centred on France, where the warmth of the welcome oered to African American artists ensured that she could ll halls not just in Paris but in medium-sized towns across the country. Limoges, famous for its porcelain, was a place she visited three times, in 1958, 1964 and 1966, and on the last occasion her performance at the Grand Theatre was recorded by ORTF, the French broadcasting network. The long-buried tapes were found in 2017 by Zev Feldman, the American producer responsible in recent years for the meticulously curated release on the Resonance label of previously unheard sessions by such jazz luminaries as the pianist Bill Evans and the guitarists Wes Montgomery and Grant Green. Sister Rosetta’s Limoges concert is the rst release on his own label, Deep Digs.
It’s just her and her guitar and the audience, and that’s all she needs for a 65-minute recital of 21 songs, including some of those with which she had become most closely associated and which she popularised. On the likes of “This Train”, Washington Phillips’s “Denomination Blues”, JW Alexander’s “Jesus Met The Woman At The Well” and such standards as “The Saints” and “Joshua Fought The Battle Of Jericho”, her singing is bold and engaging. You can imagine Bob Dylan listening to her speeded-up version of the Swan Silvertones’ “Go Ahead” and picking up tips on phrasing. And she’s never po-faced: voicing her disapproval of bootleg whisky in a song of her own called “Moonshine”, occasionally she slips into a tipsy slur: “I don’t like it, no, I don’t like it, no-nono, I don’t like it…”
There’s a reminder of her renown among the young musicians of the British R&B boom in the performance of “Up Above My Head, I Hear Music In The Air”, a gospel shout-up which she had recorded with Marie Knight in 1947. In 1964 it was borrowed by Long John Baldry for a duet with the 19-yearold studio debutant Rod Stewart featured on the B-side of “You’ll Be Mine”, Baldry’s rst single. This is the one song here on which Tharpe abandons her guitar for the piano, very eectively.
But it’s the guitar that grabs the attention, time and again. With a slightly dirtied-up sound and just as much technique as she needs to do the job, she strums and ngerpicks and lls the spaces with bluesy lls and jazzy runs. Her sense of swing is relentless, stemming not just from the hand-clapping congregations in the sanctied churches of her childhood but from her experience with Millinder and others in the world of dancehall R&B.
Was she indeed the godmother of rock’n’roll, as some now claim? As the tributaries of gospel, blues, jazz and country music converged to form one great river in the middle of the 1950s, she was certainly an important presence. But her artistry was also highly individual and personal. You can’t miss that here, on an album that makes you feel as though you’re sitting at her feet, or at least just across the tracks.