Music

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.

03.24.2005

By SHEILA LENNON
projo.com staff

When I write about music, I want the page to play music for you. Online, it will.

That Sister Rosetta Tharpe is being discovered, more than 30 years after her death in 1973 at 58, is thanks in large part to the Web. Once, you might only have heard her on an AM radio gospel show in the middle of the night if you were passing through her native Arkansas.

Today, you can see a nearly three-minute video clip of Tharpe performing Down By The Riverside in Chicago in the 1960s on the show TV Gospel Time. She's singing, bobbing, swaying and playing a hot guitar break as at least three dozen men harmonize and clap behind her. The clip and a still from it are halfway down a page devoted to Tharpe with photos, a spirited biography and audio files at It's a Girl Thang! Women in the Blues .

Quite a few blues lovers -- from the International Gospel Hall of Fame and Museum, which inducted Tharpe in 1997, to bloggers who barely reveal their names -- have devoted time and Web space to boosting this underappreciated lady's music and posthumous second wave of fame. And there was a first wave: There's a wonderful undated photo by Charles Peterson of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Hot Lips Page, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and J.C. Higginbotham at Past Perfect recordings' Jazz Gallery .

Photo courtesy of International Gospel Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Steve Hug, events MC at The Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River, which is sponsoring the Shout Sister Shout tribute to the sister in a larger hall at Bristol Community College Saturday, has assembled a nice page of annotated links to sites about Tharpe, many with song links, on his Backstage at the Narrows blog.

Blogger Jason Chervokas (The Astounding Trickster ) begins a long appreciation with, "If Sister Rosetta Tharpe had sung secular blues instead of the gospel music to which she devoted her prodigious performing career, she would be revered today as the greatest ever female rocker, an icon on par with contemporaries like Hank Williams and Robert Johnson."

He ends it with a recommendation: "It turns out that a well-chosen, single-disk Rosetta Tharpe anthology does exist -- MCA's horribly titled The Gospel of the Blues." (There are clips at that link.) He then comments on many of its 18 tracks, rueing some of his favorites that aren't there.

Chervokas also complains: "...the producers seemed to lean heavily on novelties (like one of Rosetta's only secular recordings, the drecky I Want a Tall Skinny Papa ...") You can hear a clip at that link.

Photo courtesy of International Gospel Music Hall of Fame and Museum

According to music site TC Swing, the songs on Jumpin' At The Savoy, Lucky Millinder featuring Sister Rosetta Tharpe, from which that clip comes, were recorded between 1941 and 1947. Millinder fronted an all-black big band, and an early version of Down by the Riverside is on one of these sessions. The anonymous writer at TC Swing mentions the track: "She also shines on another preachy type with Down by the River Side, a fast (200 bpm) classic that really gets your toe tappin’ once it finally gets going. It has a slow start but is worth the wait!""

If you like, there's a four-CD boxed set, Original Soul Sister, selling for $22.99 new at Amazon, where you can listen to 30-second clips of the tunes, and elsewhere, although you can probably find deals and used copies there or on eBay. Here's Amazon's Sister Rosetta Tharpe catalog, if you want to browse the eras of Tharpe.

At the pre-war blues blog Honey, Where You've Been So Long?, Peter Patnaik writes,"Sister Rosetta Tharpe, much like Son House, represents the duality in blues music to the fullest. Tharpe was an amazing guitar player, but as she recorded more and more there was great pressure to use fuller instrumentation and a more secular sound... It was unfortunate that she was being pulled by two great focuses, her secular music hides her guitar, but she could have never been just a guitar player with some preacher singing."

Teachers, want to teach the blues?

The Department of Arkansas Heritage and the Old State House Museum have developed an interactive CD-ROM -- a 2-disc set-- focusing on the museum’s Send You Back to Arkansas: Our Own Sweet Sounds II exhibit. Intended for Arkansas educators, this free "educational resource" includes an introduction by Arkansas's own Billy Bob Thornton, background on the blues, country, folk, gospel, jazz and rock music;, artist biographies (Johnny Cash, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Evanescence) and photographs, concert video clips, a jukebox with 24 tracks and more.

AP
Sister Rosetta gives an inpromptu performance in a lounge at London Airport, following her arrival from New York on November 21, 1957.

E-mail Georganne Sisco at georganne@arkansasheritage.org if you would like to receive the Sweet Sounds CD-ROM.

Tech notes

• If you've never played a music file before, click on a link to one -- they end in .mp3, .wmv, .ram, although Amazon uses its own links, but labels the files as RealAudio or Windows Media -- and see what happens. If music players are installed on your computer, one should open and, after a pause while the music file is fetched, the song or video should begin to play. If, instead, your browser offers to fetch the "plug-in" -- an accessory program your browser loads only for this type of file -- don't be afraid of that. Let it. There's a clear non-technical explanation of music files and their players written by Annette Lamb and Larry Johnson, a couple who are both educators and web developers. Their site, Eduscapes, is noncommercial resource for teachers.

• Some music files work better if you copy the link, open a music player, pull down the File menu and "Open location." Paste the link into the form and the player itself will fetch the tune, without the browser being involved.

Sheila Lennon is features & interactive producer of projo.com, the Journal's website. Email her at lennon@projo.com .