Washed in the blood: Rosetta Tharpe
How Pentecostalism informed a rock ’n’ roll prophet
Rosetta rolled her eyes when she played She knew that strange things happen every day
— Frank Turner, “Sister Rosetta”
When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.
— Acts 2:1-4
No one person invented rock ’n’ roll, unless it was some accountant in horn rims who realized that, in the economic boom after World War II, American high schoolers suddenly had spending cash. But if you’re looking for artists who combined elements of rhythm & blues with a kind of unregenerate attitude who charged their performances with the sort of urgency decent people associated with fits and conniptions, we have quite a few candidates. (As well as Chuck Berry, a cool 30-something genius churning out relatable, guitar-driven mini-dramas for the kids.)
Sister Rosetta Tharpe is a late-arriving challenger to the conventional wisdom, having first appeared on the scene in the 1930s and dying relatively forgotten, in this country at least, in 1973. She didn’t make it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame until 2018, and is more talked about by rock writers than streamed on Spotify.
This is rectifiable; digital technology has made most of Tharpe’s catalog easily accessible. And this week, Zev Feldman’s new Deep Digs record label is releasing “Sister Rosetta Tharpe Live In France: The 1966 Concert In Limoges,” a live performance of Tharpe, performing solo on vocals and guitar on 21 tracks, in the auditorium of Limoges’ Grand Theatre on Nov. 11, 1966. (A double record album was released Saturday; a single CD version will be released April 28.)
The performance was recorded by the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF), but was lost and all but forgotten until Feldman, who as a consulting producer of archival and historical recordings for Blue Note Records has earned the sobriquet “the Indiana Jones of Jazz,” found it seven years ago while rummaging around in the archives of the INA (Institut national de l’audiovisuel).
It’s not the most representative Sister Rosetta recording, but a remarkable late-career time capsule of a startlingly original artist whose influence on rock ’n’ roll is immeasurable.
Arkansas will claim Sister Rosetta, as she should.
Rosetta — aka Rosa, Rosie, Rosie Etta and Rosabell — was born on the Tilman Cooperwood farm near Cotton Plant in 1915. Her father was Willis Atkins, apparently a field hand or sharecropper. He died June 13, 1946, in Camden. The 1940 census shows him living in Ecore A-Fabre, near Camden, with his third wife Effie, four sons, and four daughters. Another child had grown up and moved away. At least five others died as infants.
It was Willis, Wald writes, who taught Rosetta the guitar, while her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, instructed her on piano and mandolin. Depending on the source, young Rosetta had acquired a degree of proficiency on the instrument by the time she was 3 or 4 years old.
According to Tharpe’s biographer Gayle Wald, Willis had a “clear, booming voice” and he and Katie “raised Rosetta in the manner of all loving and well-intentioned parents of every station and background.”
By her sixth birthday, she was off with her mother to Chicago, part of the Great Migration north. Willis did not make the trip north to Chicago with Katie and Rosetta; she never saw him again.
When Rosetta, now famous, returned to Arkansas in the early 1950s, she was hungry for information about her father and she connected with her half-brothers and sisters. Wald said they gave her all the photographs of Willis they had, and Rosetta never gave them back.
We don’t know how Willis and Katie got along. Wald, in her book “Shout, Sister Shout” quotes Rosetta’s much younger half-brother Donnell, who explains there was a split as a result of Katie’s desire to become an evangelist.
“Sister Rosetta’s mother became a preacher, and at that time a preacher couldn’t be married and staying in a house with a man, so she left my daddy while he was at work and he never did hear from her no more,” Donnell told Wald. An alternate theory Wald surfaces, one she attributes to Rosetta’s singing and life partner Marie Knight, is that Katie was never officially married to Willis, and that she was essentially driven from Cotton Plant by the stigma of having a bastard child.
We don’t know if Rosetta’s parents parting was an abandonment, an escape or an accommodation. We do know that Katie, born in 1883, would become “Mother Bell,” a gospel singer and evangelist in her own right. She was, even by her fellow Pentecostals, known for “dressing like a missionary,” in an ostentatiously modest fashion.
By 1921, when she was living in Chicago with her daughter, she was affiliated with the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). She took it as her mission to tour the South, taking the rollicking gospel to camp meetings and tent revivals. Her prodigy daughter also performed and testified. If we think about the scenario, it’s not far-fetched to imagine that Mother Bell understood the potential of Rosetta and saw her musically gifted child as a ticket out of Cotton Plant.
But Arkansas’ claim of Sister Rosetta Tharpe is deeper than a simple accident of nativity and a few barely remembered years.
TONGUES TO GLORY
Willis and Katie were Pentecostals whose lives revolved around their crude little church.
While Pentecostals trace their origin to the Apostles, modern-day American Pentecostalism has its roots in the late 19th century in the Holiness Movement inspired by Methodists John Wesley, Charles Wesley and John Fletcher. It can be taken as a reaction against the staidness and respectability of traditional denominations. In the 19th century, in America’s establishment churches, emotional modes of expression had given way to more subdued and formal worship services.
Camp meetings and roughhewn tabernacles gave way to marble sanctuaries, congregational singing to practiced choirs, extemporaneous witness to crafted sermons delivered by ministers trained in homiletics, who’d not only read the Bible but studied higher biblical criticism. Sliding over some very real doctrinal differences, some sought a Christianity more felt than studied.
By the late 19th century, Holiness had become an ecumenical multiracial movement of mostly working-class Christians alienated from the mainline denominations. Its most zealous advocates looked to return to the naive practices of first-century “Apostolic” Christianity. They believed the Second Coming of Christ imminent. They embraced uninhibited worship, which included speaking in tongues (glossolalia) and the possibility of being indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
Pentecostalism arrived at the very beginning of the 20th century at a small religious school in Topeka, Kan., called Bethel Bible College. Bethel’s founder Charles Fox Parham decreed the school’s only text would be the Bible, its only professor the Holy Spirit (with Parham serving as mouthpiece). Parham instructed his students to pray and fast — to wait on a sign.
Rosetta’s people belonged to a Holiness-Pentecostal denomination founded in 1894 by Charles Harrison Mason.
At the intersection of West Eighth and South Gaines streets in Little Rock, there is an Arkansas Heritage historical marker erected to honor Mason, who in 1897, as the marker reads, “received a revelation … near this location.” Mason declared God had given him such a name for his church, the Church of God in Christ, taken from 1 Thessalonians 2:14.
Born to former slaves in Shelby County, Tenn., in 1866, Mason moved with his family to Plumerville in 1880 following a yellow fever outbreak. Mason had contracted tuberculosis before the move, but in 1880, he experienced a vision of God which he believed cured him of the disease. His half-brother, the Rev. Israel S. Nelson, baptized him, and Mason entered the ministry as a lay preacher.
Mason married in 1890, and took over the ministry of the Mount Gale Missionary Baptist Church in Preston (Faulkner County) in 1891. The couple divorced within two years, leaving Mason depressed and suicidal. He entered Arkansas Baptist College on Nov. 1, 1893, but left within two months, unhappy with their teaching methods and presentation of the biblical message, to set up his own church.
His Pentecostalism sought to incorporate the Black experience in the New World. Mason remembered his mother had stressed a worship culture that included emotional and preformative prayer, song, dance, and a tradition of “hush harbor” (also known as “brush harbor” or “bush arbor”) meetings in secluded and informal outdoor structures constructed of tree branches, reminiscent of the places slaves met clandestinely to reach back into the African past.
The church he established was radical for its encouragement of rhythmic musical experimentation and expression in service of praising the Lord, as well as allowing women to preach and sing in church. It took a liberal view of instrumentation; it admitted elements of ragtime, jazz, blues and swing along with traditional spirituals and hymns. It allowed for bodies to move as rhythm dictated.
It was an embarrassment to a lot of middle-class Black churchgoers, whose denominations were by and large modeled on white Protestantism.
In 1907, Mason spent five weeks at a Holiness revival in Los Angeles. The Azusa Street Revival, as it came to be known, had begun the year before at the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission in Los Angeles. The mission’s leader, a one-eyed Holiness church pastor and former member of the African Methodist Episcopal church named William J. Seymour, had been exposed to Parham’s teachings at a Bible school in Houston.
He was conducting a prayer meeting at a nearby house — 214 North Bonnie Brae St. After telling a story about how a congregant had come to be baptized, several members of the group began speaking in tongues. Jennie Moore, who had never before played the piano, sat down at the instrument and played beautifully. The next evening, after a day spent in prayer, Seymour began to speak in tongues.
Attendance at the prayer meetings dramatically increased. Another location was needed. Within a few days a lease was signed at what was to become the Azusa Street Mission. Mason made his way there and felt the Spirit move in him.
“When I opened my mouth to say glory, a flame touched my tongue which ran down in me,” Mason later wrote. “My language changed and no word could I speak in my own tongue. My soul was then satisfied.”
When Mason returned from the revival, some of his congregants could not accept his testimony about speaking in tongues. This led to a rift in the Church of God in Christ, which resulted in a split, with Mason taking about 10 churches and retaining the Church of God in Christ name.
The Cotton Plant church Willis and Katie attended was COGIC, which had its world headquarters 80 miles away in Memphis.
THIS WOMEN’S WORK
In 1911, Mason established a COGIC “Women’s Department,” which offered women the opportunity to travel and preach the Gospel. This was four years before Rosetta was born, but when Katie and her daughter found themselves in Chicago in 1921, they quickly connected with the COGIC-affiliated Roberts Temple Church of God, known as “40th Street” under the guidance of Elder William M. Roberts. (The church, which in the 1930s and ’40s had as its unofficial mode “Rock, Church Rock” — also hosted the 1955 funeral of Emmett Till.)
Young Rosetta is said to have made her performing debut there when she was 6, with “Papa” Roberts lifting her up onto the piano so she could be seen in the back. Soon she was a solo performer, accompanying herself on guitar. Roberts — who’d been hand-picked by Mason to lead the Chicago denomination — may have had a hand in suggesting that Katie and Rosetta take their show on the road.
While Rosetta and her mother remained members of the congregation until the mid-1930s, they lived peripatetic lives, traveling around the country spreading the good news. She married COGIC preacher Tommy Thorpe in 1934 and tweaked his last name to use as her stage name.
Katie and Rosetta settled in Miami for a while before moving to New York in 1938, where Rosetta began regularly performing at Harlem’s Cotton Club. That same year she recorded four songs for Decca Records — “Rock Me,” “That’s All,” “My Man and I” and “The Lonesome Road,” the first gospel music the label had ever recorded — all of which were instant hits, establishing her as one of the first commercially successful gospel recording artists.
And, at the very least a harbinger of rock ’n’ roll.
PALE CHILDREN
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was deemed an “overnight sensation,” and there was a predictable backlash among some churchgoers. The only thing that marked her music as gospel was the spiritually inclined lyrics — otherwise it could pass for secular blues and pop and jazz. She performed in secular nightclubs (where the sinners were, as well as the money), and with blues and jazz musicians and dancers. Plus she played guitar — thrillingly, using the demon electricity as an extra dimension of disturbment.
There is evidence to suggest that Tharpe loathed some of the more secular material she was given to perform, such as 1944’s raunchy (for its time) “I Want Tall Skinny Papa,” but found herself hamstrung by contractual obligations.
In 1944, she recorded her version of the old spiritual “Strange Things Happening Every Day” with Decca’s house boogie woogie pianist Sammy Price. It’s as good a candidate for the first rock ’n’ roll record as any, and it was the first gospel record to cross over and become a hit on the “race records” chart, the term then used for what later became the R&B chart, and reached No. 2 on the Billboard “race” chart in April 1945.
As influential as she was — Elvis Presley, 20 years her junior, was a devoted fan as a schoolboy — Tharpe’s career waned in the ’50s, though she was still popular in Europe where she regularly toured. During her 1964 tour of Europe, in a revue that included blues singers Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Little Willie Smith, Reverend Gary Davis, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Tharpe performed a concert in the rain at the decommissioned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester, England.
The concert, recorded by Granada Television and widely available, has achieved iconic status as it reveals a dynamic artist in the throes of an ecstatically charged performance not far removed from what survivors of the Azusa Street Revival described. She closed her eyes and raked her closely held white Gibson Les Paul Custom (a model we now know as the SG) as she powered through the gospel tune “Didn’t It Rain?”
And in the audience, watching her, were the likes of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards and Brian Jones. Rosetta’s pale, guitar hero children, washed in the blood.