Arkansas singer Tharpe to join rock hall of fame
“godmother of rock ’n’ roll” has made her way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Cotton Plant native whose guitar playing and singing brought together the emotions of gospel and the gritty drive of early rock ’n’ roll, was among the six inductees announced Wednesday by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Others were Bon Jovi, The Cars, Dire Straits, the Moody Blues and Nina Simone.
Induction ceremonies will be April 14 at Public Hall in Cleveland.
Tharpe, a first-time nominee, will become the sixth Arkansan inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, joining Levon Helm of Phillips County, Louis Jordan of Brinkley, Al Green of Forrest City, Johnny Cash of Kingsland and Little Willie John of Cullendale.
“It’s decades overdue,” said Stephen Koch, host of the Arkansasongs radio program where Tharpe’s music is often featured. “She was like the Jimi Hendrix of her day, blowing people’s minds with these guitar skills that seemed out of nowhere, from the future.”
Tharpe’s music loomed
large over the first generation of rockers like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. Cash called her his favorite singer, and Tharpe was the first person to put a 14-year-old Richard Penniman, later known as Little Richard, on stage.
“If you listen to your heroes, they were telling you, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the bomb,” said John Miller, music coordinator of Arkansas Sounds, a project of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. “People that everybody recognizes today as being the roots of rock and roll and popular music, they all were influenced by her.
“She was such a groundbreaker on so many levels.”
Perhaps the biggest surprise for many was that it took so long for the Hall of Fame — which in 1986 inducted its first members, including Presley, Lewis, Buddy Holly and Ray Charles — to acknowledge Tharpe’s influence.
“She should have been in that first class, frankly,” Miller said. “But I’m just glad she was recognized.”
Tharpe was born in Cotton Plant on March 20, 1915, to Katie Bell Nubin Atkins and Willis Atkins. Her mother played mandolin and sang at Church of God in Christ services.
Tharpe was 4 years old when she began singing and playing guitar, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. By the time she was 6, she was a regular onstage with her mother, whose mandolin playing was an influence on the young Tharpe’s guitar approach.
The two toured the South, playing church services and revivals. In the late 1920s, they moved to Chicago. Tharpe headed for New York in the mid-1930s and married minister Thomas Thorpe in 1934. They divorced, and Tharpe changed the spelling of Thorpe to what became her stage name.
She was signed to Decca Records in 1938 and found immediate success with “This Train” and “Hide Me in Thy Bosom,” the latter of which was released as “Rock Me.” She forged a path of recording both gospel and secular music at a time when the two rarely mixed.
“For her to do this in the context of her religion and being a black female, it was her talent that drove her to the top and helped her overcome all those hurdles,” Koch said.
With jazz bandleader Lucky Millinder, she cut definitive tracks like “Shout, Sister, Shout” and “That’s All.” Her 1945 recording of “Strange Things Happening Every Day” is said to have been the first gospel song to pick up play on the R&B charts, reaching No. 2.
Miller remembers when he first learned of Tharpe’s crossover status and how surprised he was.
“I was under the impression that the only person who ever crossed over from gospel to pop was [singer] Sam Cooke,” he said. “But then I learned she predated Sam Cooke, and that really stuck out in my mind. And then she had all these other songs.”
Gayle Wald, author of the
2007 biography Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, noted Tharpe’s genius for “mixing piety with pageantry.”
Her live performances, some of which can be found on YouTube, show a fervent, supremely confident artist.
“She’s always been known for these transcendent, noholds-barred performances, which was so shocking for a woman, especially a black woman, at that time,” Miller said.
Her success continued into the 1950s. She married her third husband, Russell Morrison, in front of a crowd of 25,000 at Griffin Stadium in Washington, D.C. Though she continued to tour and record, her popularity faded in the 1960s. She had a stroke in 1970 and died in Philadelphia in 1973.
In 2013, the PBS series American Masters featured her in an episode titled “Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother
of Rock and Roll,” and during this year’s session of the Arkansas Legislature, House Bill 2179 designated portions of various state highways to honor Tharpe, Jordan, Helm and Cash.
A sign marks the Sister Rosetta Tharpe Memorial Highway, 8 miles southeast of Cotton Plant on Arkansas 17.
This year’s new members were chosen from 19 nominees. Inductees are eligible 25 years after the release of their first recordings. The significance of their influence and contributions to the development of rock and popular music are among the criteria considered for nomination, according to the hall’s website.
More than 900 music industry insiders and critics vote on the nominees. Fans also are allowed to vote, although those votes account for only a fraction of the overall total.
New Jersey rockers Bon Jovi helped kick-start the hair metal genre that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s with albums like Slippery When Wet and New Jersey.
The Cars, based in Boston, took their catchy version of new wave to the radio in songs like “Just What I Needed” and were an early MTV mainstay with hits like “You Might Think” and the moody “Drive.”
British band the Moody Blues, which had a hit with “Nights in White Satin,” formed in 1964 and recorded R&B-based music before transforming into one of the first progressive rock bands, mixing symphonic arrangements with psychedelic rock.
Simone, born in North Carolina, was named by Rolling Stone as one of the greatest singers of all time. Her recordings of songs like “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” “Four Women” and “Mississippi G ***** ” were part of the soundtrack to the civil-rights movement. Among her fans is Bob Dylan, who has described Simone as “an overwhelming artist, piano player and singer … the kind of artist I loved and admired.”
Fronted by singer-guitarist Mark Knopfler, Dire Straits became an FM radio staple with “Sultans of Swing” and wryly captured the MTV generation with “Money for Nothing,” while Knopfler’s deft guitar picking on albums like 1978’s Dire Straits, 1980’s Making Movies and the mega-selling Brothers in Arms from 1985 inspired a generation of guitarists.