Guitar icon Tharpe 6th in top 250

An Arkansas music pioneer and legend is among the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, according to Rolling Stone.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who grew up in Cotton Plant, was ranked sixth, right between Nile Rodgers in seventh and Jeff Beck in fifth on the magazine’s sprawling list, which was released Oct. 13.

Tharpe was a gospel performer who crossed over to mainstream success and became a major influence on Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Little Richard, Brittany Howard and fellow Arkansan Johnny Cash, among others. Her guitar playing was influenced by her mother, Katie Bell Nubin Atkins, who played mandolin, according to the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas. The pair performed together often when Tharpe was growing up.

Tharpe, who died at 58 on Oct. 9, 1973, in Philadelphia, was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2012 and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.

“Before rock & roll even existed, she … practically invented the concept of the guitar hero,” claims Rolling Stone. “Her picking and arpeggios on 1945’s ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’ matched the song’s buoyant boogie-woogie and her own vivacious singing … .”

The magazine also notes that in 1964 Eric Clapton (35th on the list), Keith Richards (15th) and Beck traveled to Manchester, England to see Tharpe perform for a televised folk, blues and gospel special.

I asked Stephen Koch, a Sister Rosetta superfan and host of the radio program “Arkansongs,” which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, about Tharpe and her impact on popular music.

“Part of what made her playing especially unique, beyond being one of the few Black women of her time playing guitar commercially at all, was her aggressive guitar style in what was a largely gospel and church setting,” he said in a text.

Koch recommended a few seminal Tharpe tracks for those not familiar with her music and six-string skills:

“Can’t Sit Down,” live, 1960; “God Don’t Like It,” 1939; “My Journey to The Sky,” with Marie Knight and the Sam Price Trio, 1947; “Two Little Fishes and Five Loaves of Bread,” live, 1960 and with the Sam Price Trio, 1944.

“These songs show something about her guitar playing that’s not talked about as much — her progression as a musician,” Koch notes. “Her style when she came on the scene in the late ’30s and early ’40s playing a National [guitar] was more mannered. In the 1950s and 1960s she switched to electric Gibsons — a Les Paul and her iconic white SG. She was playing a lot of single string leads as befit those instruments, and yet still managed to be as ahead of her time as she’d been coming out of the gate. The two different versions of ‘Two Little Fishes’ may highlight the progression.”