Sister Rosetta Tharpe?
“That girl could play that guitar.”
“Lord have mercy! She would make it talk!”
“Made that guitar walk and talk.”
Ask gospel fans, especially those mature—don’t say old—enough to have seen Rosetta live, listened to her records in their heyday, or even performed with her, and the phrase inevitably comes up: She made that guitar talk. The expression praises Rosetta’s talents as an instrumentalist, and yet it also speaks metaphorically to how she played and what her playing meant to those who felt moved by her music. She made that guitar talk conveys how Rosetta transformed the guitar into an extension of her body, how she could let her instrument speak through and for her.
Within the gospel world, Rosetta’s guitar playing was exceptional. “When Chuck Berry came out, I had seen all that,” says Chicago gospel singer Geraldine Gay Hambric. Indeed, like more famous male players, Rosetta had an elemental connection with her instrument as well as technical prowess. “You would wonder where she learned to play a guitar like that,” remembers Alfred Miller, musical director at Washington Temple COGIC in Brooklyn, where Rosetta’s friend Madame Ernestine Washington was First Lady. “She could do runs, she could do sequences, she could do arpeggios, and she could play anything with the guitar. You could say something and she could make that guitar say it. . . . I mean, she could put that guitar behind her and play it; she could sit on the floor and play it, she could lay down and play it. Oh, she was an artist! And that made the people just go berserk, and they just knew that she was alright whatever she did.”
“That was her style. Anytime she went on . . . she was emotional with her guitar,” says Marie Knight, recalling the times she and Rosetta sang together in the 1940s and ’50s. Rosetta’s guitar “was an extension of her,” remembers Lottie Smith, who sang with Rosetta’s 1950s-era backup group, the Rosettes, “because you know she just blended so well with it. And different chords she’d play she’d have different movements. She was just bound into that thing. She just carried it with her. It was something to see her.”
“Making the guitar talk” had significance specific to Rosetta’s position as a gospel singer and her upbringing in the Church of God in Christ. In musical terms, it paralleled the religious practice of speaking in tongues. Outsiders to Pentecostal faiths often ridicule tongue-speaking as gibberish, or as a performance faked for dramatic effect. But for believers, tongue-speaking attests to the authenticity of the experience of possession by the Holy Ghost.
“Where did rock and roll come from? It came from the music of the Negro churches, definitely,” once noted Pearl Bailey, another famously flamboyant performer who grew up in the Sanctified Church. “Just listen to the beat and go to one of the churches and see if you don’t hear the same thing.”1 Indeed, rock and roll took not only the beats of the church but, less self-consciously, its mode of ecstatic talking. After Rosetta, rock guitar “gods”—here the metaphor of divinity seems less than incidental—appropriated the euphoric practice of tongue-speaking in their guitar solos. They too made their instruments talk, in the language of a strutting and ebullient masculinity.
“Like the kids say today, she got down with it,” says Jeannette Eason, Rosetta’s friend and the wife of renowned steel guitarist Willie Eason. “Mahalia had a beautiful voice and all, but she couldn’t compete with Rosetta Tharpe. . . . When you look at Rosetta, Rosetta got her man in her hand, in a way of speaking. And Mahalia had to depend on other people. She sung beautiful and all. And Mahalia went over what, a million records or something like that? Rosetta never got that far . . . but between the two of them? I mean I liked her singing and all, but Rosetta was it.”
Rosetta may have had “her man in her hand,” but she never exemplified the stereotypical image of the guitar as a phallic symbol in her playing. Instead, as a black woman with few outlets for public speaking, Rosetta fashioned a distinct means to speak through her guitar. When Rosetta made the guitar talk, she bristled with kinetic energy, especially at the bridge, that portion of a song given over to her instrumental solo. At the bridge, Rosetta didn’t need words, because the guitar could do both the singing and the talking for her. Emotionally and musically, the bridge was the climax of a song, giving rise to its most satisfying and thrilling moments precisely because it was free of the distraction of lyrics.
When Rosetta’s fans said she could make that guitar talk, they meant she could play the instrument with abandon while still exercising exquisite control. When she made the guitar talk, she gave her audience an opportunity to feel excitement, pleasure, power, and emotional release in the sounds she generated. She loved nothing more than the cacophony of a few hundred—or several thousand—fans yelling out: “Go on, girl! Make it talk, Rosetta!”
Today, we tend to use the term “charisma” in a secular sense to describe the drawing power of everyone from athletes to heads of state. Yet the roots of the word are in the ancient Greek term for “divine gift.” Rosetta possessed charisma in both senses. Well before the guitar gods of more recent decades made a fetish of the guitar solo as an orgiastic expression of male sexual libido, Rosetta perfected something both more subtle and more radical: the art of the guitar as an instrument of ineffable speech, of rapture beyond words.