Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973)

Rosetta Tharpe was a groundbreaking, profoundly impacting American music history pioneer by pioneering the guitar technique that would eventually evolve into the rock and roll style played by Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Eric Clapton. However, despite her great popularity and influence on music history, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was first and foremost a gospel musician.

Born Rosetta Nubin on March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. Although the identity of her father is unknown, Tharpe's mother, Katie Bell Nubin, was a singer, mandolin player and evangelist. At the encouragement of her mother, Tharpe began singing and playing the guitar from a very young age, and was by all accounts a musical prodigy. She began performing onstage with her mother from the age of four.  By age six, she had joined her mother as a regular performer in a traveling evangelical troupe - before audiences all across the American South. By the mid-20s, Tharpe and her mother had settled in Chicago, Illinois. where the duo continued to perform religious concerts. In 1934, at the age of 19, Rosetta Tharpe married a preacher named Thomas Thorpe.  Although the marriage only lasted a short time, she decided to incorporate her husband's surname into her stage name, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, which she would use for the rest of her career.

In 1938, Tharpe moved to New York City, where she signed a recording deal with Decca Records. On October 31 of that year, she recorded four songs for Decca. The first gospel songs ever recorded for Decca, all of these recordings became instant hits, establishing Tharpe as one of the nation's first commercially successful gospel singer. On December 23, 1938, Tharpe performed at Carnegie Hall. Her performance was controversial and revolutionary. Performing gospel music in front of secular audiences and alongside blues and jazz musicians was highly unusual. Within conservative religious circles, the mere fact of a woman performing guitar music was frowned upon. Musically, Tharpe's unique guitar style blended melody-driven urban blues with traditional folk arrangements and incorporated a pulsating swing sound that is one of the first clear precursors of rock and roll. The performance shocked and awed the Carnegie Hall audience.

In the mid-1940s, Tharpe gained, even more, notoriety by performing regularly with jazz legend Cab Calloway at Harlem's famous Cotton Club. Tharpe scored another musical breakthrough by teaming up with blues pianist Sammy Price to record music featuring an unprecedented combination of piano, guitar, and gospel singing. However, the religious community, who viewed her jazzy collaborations with Price as the devil's music,

On July 3, 1951. Tharpe married Russell Morrison. The elaborate ceremony held at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., attended by some 25,000 paying audience members, featured a gospel performance by Tharpe in her wedding dress and finished with a massive fireworks display.

While on a European blues tour with Muddy Waters in 1970, Tharpe suffered a stroke and returned to the United States. But despite her health woes, Tharpe continued to perform regularly for several more years. In October 1973, however, she suffered a second stroke and passed away days later, on October 9, 1973, at the age of 58, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.