Gospel shouter

09:43 AM EST on Thursday, March 24, 2005

BY RICK MASSIMO
Journal Pop Music Writer

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was probably America's first gospel-music star, and perhaps one of its least-appreciated musical innovators.

Born Rosetta Nubin, the daughter of a singing preacher in Arkansas, most likely in 1915, she was a first-rate gospel shouter who could also sing sweetly when the situation called for it. Accompanying herself on guitar, she combined gospel and the blues, took them in a new direction and pointed the way to rock 'n' roll.

She was a huge popular success in her time -- in 1951, 27,000 people turned out to Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., to hear a concert that was preceded by her wedding to her manager. She toured, by herself and with Madame Marie Knight, for more than 20 years and her records charted consistently.

And she didn't sing strictly gospel -- she had "race" (the euphemism for "black") hits in the early '40s with such groups as the Lucky Millinder Orchestra and Cab Calloway, and played blues in bars, although these were controversial moves at the time.

Tharpe had a stroke in 1970 that curtailed her performing, and she died after a second stroke in 1973. After that, the memory of her music and her influence waned. A black woman guitar hero doesn't fit the mold. And in a musical landscape where even black men had (and still have) a hard time getting their due as musical innovators, what chance did she have?

But things are changing. Several compilations of her recordings have come out over the years, and in 2002 the all-star tribute record Shout, Sister, Shout! put her best-known songs in the hands of such famous fans as Odetta, Joan Osborne, Phoebe Snow, Janis Ian, Maria Muldaur, The Holmes Brothers and more.

Photo by Charles Peterson / Courtesy of Don Peterson

Sister Rosetta Tharpe performing at Café Society in New York City's Greenwich Village, Dec. 11, 1940.

"She's absolutely one of the geniuses of music of the 20th century," says Mark Carpentieri, of MC Records, who put together the Shout, Sister, Shout! record. "I really thought she was overlooked. She was not a marginal person -- she had huge chart hits."

"Her influence has been long and deep," says Gayle Wald, a professor at George Washington University who is writing a book about Tharpe, "but you have to scratch under the right surface to find it. . . . She really set a standard for rock guitar before anyone called it rock guitar."

The Holmes Brothers, Knight and Odetta do periodic shows entitled Shout, Sister, Shout! celebrating Tharpe's music. And on Saturday night, they'll be at Bristol Community College in Fall River.

Beautiful artist

"I remember her as a very beautiful artist when I first met her," Knight, now 79, says from New York, where she still performs and is a minister. "It was the action that she had on the floor, and how she went before the people."

Tharpe heard Knight at a concert where gospel star Mahalia Jackson also was on the bill, Knight says, and took her in immediately. "She was a beautiful person to team with. Fact about it, she claimed me as her little sister."

"I learned a lot from her, and she learned a lot from me," Knight says. Tharpe's wail and Knight's more down-to-earth range blended well, and "our voices gave the people something they did not have."

They made many records and traveled "all over the United States and outside" in their 22 years together, sometimes logging up to 70 one-nighters in a row.

Folksinger Odetta, 74, didn't know Tharpe personally, but first heard her on the radio, became a fan and studied Tharpe's history.

"She decided to go secular, to take her music into secular areas," Odetta says of Tharpe's records with Millinder and others. "And the church people turned on her. Would not forgive her for that."

According to Odetta, Mahalia Jackson "learned from the example of Sister Rosetta Tharpe that you don't fool with the church people."

Carpentieri agrees. "Her mixing of secular and gospel music . . . was not looked upon well. So I think a lot of her core audience . . . just moved on."

That perception "doesn't totally reflect her reality, which is that she thought of herself as a religious artist," says Wald. "There's a lot made of the notion that she was controversial, and she certainly was unusual, but it's easy to say, 'Oh, she was controversial.' I think that's overplayed a lot. . . .

"She actually didn't cut that many secular sides. She did gospel music with what people thought of as a worldly flavor. She played spiritual music in a way that reminded most people of secular sounds." And Wald posits the theory that Tharpe's gospel audience was waning not because people were shocked but because tastes had simply changed.

Maybe so, but Carpentieri said "we asked many traditional gospel artists" to appear on the Shout, Sister, Shout! album, and they all declined. "I think that speaks volumes right there."

Courtesy of the Old State House Museum, in Little Rock, Ark.

A painting of Sister Rosetta Tharpe done by Gary Patterson and Marion Barnes is one of a dozen likenesses of Arkansas musicians commissioned by a Little Rock Museum.

Forebear of rock

Still, Odetta says those records raised Tharpe's profile. "And maybe if she hadn't included the secular, we may not have heard of her. God knows how many incredible singers, who have only been in the church, we've missed."

"There might be some truth to that irony," Wald says, "in that efforts to reclaim her have largely been on the side of being a forebear of rock 'n' roll. . . . She has a funny place in both traditions -- she doesn't necessarily occupy a central place in the stories people tell about gospel, and she doesn't necessarily occupy a central place in the stories people tell about rock 'n' roll. So she's treated as a marginal figure in both."

That mix of gospel and secular music certainly is familiar to Sherman Holmes. For 40 years, the vocal and instrumental trio of Holmes, his brother Wendell and Popsy Dixon has been mixing saintly gospel singing with raw R&B.

Holmes, 65, first heard Tharpe as a young child and was hooked. "Well, as a kid, it was some of the rhythms. Not so much the message at that age."

The resistance Tharpe got for making secular records was somewhat familiar to Holmes. "I guess we get that from some quarters [too], but remember, gospel music is a mixture of secular music. Maybe people have forgotten about that. It started by not having enough musicians to play in the church, so they had secular musicians come in."

Guitar influence

"Her playing the guitar influenced a whole lot of the blues guitarists," Odetta says. And the beginnings of rock 'n' roll and R&B can be heard in Sister Tharpe's playing, particularly her interplay with her regular piano player, Sammy Price.

Listen to Tharpe's solos on 1946's "Up Above My Head," one of many gospel duets with Knight, and "That's All," from the landmark 1938 Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall (where she played on the bill with such greats as Benny Goodman, Meade Lux Lewis and Sidney Bechet), or her televised performance of "Down By the Riverside" from the '60s. Swinging arrangements with rollicking piano and gritty guitar harmonies and bent notes, the interplay between Tharpe's guitar and the piano of (usually) Price recall the work of Chuck Berry and his piano player, Johnnie Johnson. Except it comes more than 10 years earlier.

In the '50s, Tharpe switched over to electric guitar -- still a fairly new instrument.

Audiences "didn't think it was strange," Knight says, "because they were happy with her being as emotional as she was, playing the guitar. Because she didn't know music; she didn't read music. It went from ear."

Yet she's rarely listed among the progenitors of the music.

"As is not unexpected," Odetta says, "the men project, and the woman is just sort of there, inspiring. It's almost the same as when, in certain parts of the music industry, the blacks think of something to do, and then they bring the great white hope out, to put the energy in back of the great white hope.

"We really live in a weird country, splendid as it is."

Asked another question about Tharpe's lack of recognition, Odetta's voice hardens. "You know the biasedness in this country. You know it's not up to her whether people hear of her or don't hear of her. . . . Because the society didn't allow her to do this, that or the other thing."

"It seems like she's been forgotten in a lot of places," Holmes says. "Things evolve, and people tend to put old things behind them. And they shouldn't. . . . She should be remembered more, and hopefully this [series of shows] will help her memory. . . . Don't know it'll do her any good now, but she did all right when she was alive."

Odetta says that while Tharpe's commercial legacy isn't what it should be, her influence remains.

"Not economically, not big entertainment whatever, but being laid to rest has certainly not laid her music to rest, that vitality. And also, that must have been a very strong personality, a very strong woman, because who in the world was supporting this young girl with a guitar. . . .

"She has not been lost. There is more due that is needed, but she has not been lost."

Shout, Sister, Shout! featuring Odetta, The Holmes Brothers and Marie Knight, will be at Bristol Community College's Jackson Arts Center, 777 Elsbree St., Fall River, Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $30; call (508) 324-1926.