She belonged more to the world, I guess. I don’t mean the worldly world, but the people. . . . her voice was for people to hear and to know.
Camille Roberts
When gospel singers sing the familiar lines about putting on their “travelin’ shoes,” they’re referring not to a day’s trek, but to the ultimate journey, from this world to the next. Gospel songs focus almost entirely on the other world and its promises of everlasting life, unburdened by sorrow or suffering. That doesn’t mean that gospel or Holiness religion are escapist, however; even as they celebrate the prospect of “going to see the King,” they also give people strength to engage with the world, to stand the storms of everyday life. “Blues are songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope,” observed Mahalia Jackson, widely considered the First Lady of the music’s mid-twentieth-century Golden Age. “When you sing them you are delivered of your burden. You have a feeling that here is a cure for what’s wrong.”1
But the dozens of black sacred songs that celebrate “travelin’ ” also narrate the secular journey undertaken in the first decades of the twentieth century by millions of black Southerners as they migrated to the “Promised Land” of industrial cities such as Chicago, looking for economic opportunity and freedom from segregation and repressive violence.2 Some, like Katie Atkins and her daughter Rosie, may well have landed in Chicago in search of opportunities to practice their religion in larger fellowships, thereby combining sacred and secular journeys. In any case, the pace of black migration to Chicago—considered part of “the North” by the migrants—was staggering: whereas in 1920 the black population of Chicago totaled 127,033, by 1930, according to statistics cited by migrant Richard Wright, it had swelled to almost 234,000.3
For Katie Atkins, Chicago represented economic opportunity as well as a place to save souls seduced by urban vices. As it did for many displaced black women, Katie’s distinction as a Pentecostal enabled her to claim respectability, although she arrived there with a daughter and no husband.4 Nevertheless, tensions were common between established black Chicagoans and their seemingly backward country brethren. For even as assimilated black urbanites devoted themselves energetically to the task of uplifting and educating the migrants, so they also sought to distance themselves from people who had the aura of outsiders—in their speech, the clothes they wore, the types of leisure they pursued, and, not least, their forms of religious expression.
Like a lot of migrants, Katie and her daughter were what Chicagoan Alva Roberts, a childhood friend of Rosetta’s, calls “steady movers.” At some point they lived on the West Side, in the neighborhood around the 1000 block of Thirteenth Street, recalls Musette Hubbard, who attended John M. Smith Elementary School with “Rosabell,” as some Chicagoans remember her. (The name probably derived from Katie’s short-lived marriage to a man named Bell, about whom little is known.) The girl Musette remembers was shy, while her mother distinguished herself, even by Pentecostal standards, for her puritanical attire. In her full-length, long-sleeved black dresses, “Mother” or “Ma” Bell looked old-fashioned, like someone out of the nineteenth century. Camille Roberts, Alva Roberts’s in-law, remembers that Katie was “tall and sturdy” and dressed “like a missionary. Some might have thought she was a grandmother from her style of dress.” They no longer had Cotton Plant lint on their clothes, but when Katie and Rosie walked down any main thoroughfare in black Chicago, their cosmopolitan neighbors saw the Sanctified Church writ large on their bodies and in their bearing.
Mother and daughter’s first stop in the city may well have been its largest Church of God in Christ, located on Fortieth and State Streets on the South Side, just east of where most of black Chicago’s storefront churches were located. Its pioneering members universally referred to it simply as “Fortieth Street.” Such was the convention of the day, says Alva Roberts. She remembers how black children would identify themselves by their church membership: “I’m from 1319 West Thirteenth Street, and Elder P. R. Favors is my pastor!” they would stand up straight and announce.
When the children of Fortieth Street identified themselves to their peers, it was as members of the flock of Elder W. M. Roberts, a light-skinned man whose mother was the daughter of a slave woman and her Irish master. An early disciple of COGIC founder Charles Mason, Elder Roberts had his mentor’s energy and resourcefulness. “I would say that the pastor was a man filled with a spirited urge,” recollects Camille Roberts, who made the trip to Chicago from Atlanta with her mother and siblings around the same time as Katie and Rosetta. As custom had it, Camille’s mother arrived with a letter of introduction addressed to Reverend Roberts from her pastor in Georgia, stamping her as a woman who would enrich the church and its reputation.
For Fortieth Street had a grand mission, despite its commonplace name. In the early 1920s, when Rosetta and Katie became members, it may well have been the largest COGIC congregation in the United States, larger even than the mother church of Bishop Mason in Memphis. By 1928, when the number of Holiness churches in Chicago had grown to fifty-six (from twenty in 1919), it was certainly the most respected COGIC church in the city.5 “Papa Roberts,” as he was fondly known, preached a practical, Booker T. Washington–style gospel of black self-reliance, even as he taught his flock to trust in God for all things. In the 1930s, he began broadcasting on WGCI, so that others could benefit from God’s word.
Fortieth Street was a strivers’ church, serious in its commitment to self-development. Veteran members of Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, as it is now known, relate proudly that theirs was the first “black-built” church in all Chicago, not excluding the more well known mainline congregations. “We built that [church] from the ground,” recalls Camille Roberts, who arrived in May 1922, a month after construction had begun. “We built just one floor at one time. I have a picture that says 1927”—the year church members had their first convocation upstairs. “See, [after that] we moved to a second floor. Then we expanded to property on the side. Then it expanded. Then we put a balcony. So that’s how we grew.”
Building their own church instilled self-respect in the members of Fortieth Street and further confirmed their faith in God’s blessings. “The bigger churches, the people of other color would move out, and then other people would buy their churches,” Camille explains, referring to the ways growing black congregations purchased synagogues and white churches when their membership relocated. “Pilgrim being one of the big churches. Ebenezer. They were white. . . . But ours was the largest at the time because we built it from the ground.” Indeed, before the church acquired it in 1922, Pilgrim Baptist, at 3301 South Indiana Avenue, had served a Jewish South Side congregation as Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv synagogue. Perhaps the single most significant church in the history of gospel music, because of its association with Thomas Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, and others, Pilgrim Baptist made international headlines when it suffered a devastating fire in January 2006.
Becoming members of Fortieth Street in the early 1920s was definitive in the lives of Katie and her daughter. “I’m from 4021 South State Street and Pastor Roberts is my preacher!” Rosabell might have exclaimed to her school friends. In addition to giving them an identity, the church offered them a ready social network, a home base for Katie Bell’s missionary work, and—through special collections for new arrivals and others in need—aid in establishing themselves amid unfamiliar surroundings. “I knew people that would take [Rosetta] and buy shoes, you know, for her, to see that she was dressed neatly,” Camille Roberts recalls. “I don’t mean fancy clothes. . . . People that could sew that could make things for her.”
Most important where Rosetta’s musical development was concerned, Reverend Roberts followed COGIC founder Charles Mason’s liberal approach to sound. “They had a phrase: ‘Rock Church Rock,’ ” says Camille, explaining her church’s philosophy. “Music comes from God; it’s the words that counts.” Such were the teachings of Papa Roberts, who also embraced the COGIC mandate, derived from Psalm 150, to praise God with all manner of instruments, including the washboards and handmade guitars of poor rural folk. Whatever form it took, the music of prayer glorified God. As a church elder had once said, “The devil should not be allowed to keep all this good rhythm.”6
Sunday morning services at Fortieth Street in the mid-1920s featured loud voices singing to the raucous accompaniment of tambourines, drums, triangles, a piano, guitars, and even brass, if a trumpet or trombone was available. (Not until 1928 did the church buy an organ.) Although there might be a featured soloist on a given Sunday, from week to week the “saints”—as Pentecostals called themselves—made their own music. Singing and playing were integral parts of the service, to the point where music and prayer merged. A shouting session could last the better part of an hour, its duration limited only by the energy of the congregation; often a member fainted or, if touched by the Holy Spirit, commenced ecstatic tongue-speaking and holy dancing. As Pastor Roberts preached, beginning with Scripture but then launching into an improvisational riff, the congregation buoyed him with their own shouted responses: “Yes, Sir.” “Say it.” “Praise the Lord.” “Amen to that.” Even in the Windy City, the un-air-conditioned building could be oppressively hot, and at the height of summer members fanned themselves to relieve the sweat and humidity. The dress code was somber, reflecting the seriousness of the Holiness enterprise, as well as the pride of people bent on achieving uprightness on their own terms, not through money or cultivation, but through sanctification.
In 1958, Rosetta would give her only two recorded accounts of her early performance history in Chicago. “I remember that my mother set me on her knees when she played the harmonium at church,” she told the French interviewer François Postif. “I would tap ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ with a single finger and my mother accompanied me with her left hand. When we moved to Chicago, I was six years old, and I already played the guitar pretty well. One of our neighbors, Miss Foley, took an interest in me and hired my mother as a domestic to have me close to her. But one day, my mother had had enough of working for her, and the two of us set out to travel the church circuit.”7
On her Mercury LP The Gospel Truth, recorded live before a COGIC audience six months after the interview with Postif, she told a similar story. “I started to playing music at the age of three years old,” she testified. “[My mother] set me on her knee, and I would play an organ ‘This Far by Faith’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ I heard angels singing!” The congregation can be heard on the recording, responding with a shouted “Yes, Lord!” of encouragement.8
Rosetta’s 1958 stories, although the products of a gospel celebrity fully practiced in the art of self-mythologizing, contain important emotional and factual truths. She confirms that her first musical experiences took place within the church, and that she played notes on the piano even before she plucked the strings of a guitar. She reveals that Katie worked as a domestic to supplement her income, and suggests that her frustration with her job fueled her determination to seek a living as a full-time traveling evangelist. Most important, she explains that she was considered a “special child” from early on, and how this indelibly shaped her own and others’ images of her. Over the ensuing years, especially after she broke out as a national recording star, Rosetta changed her story about her age, her origins, and her personal life—omitting a marriage here, there neglecting the finer points of her capacity for immoderation. But she talked consistently of her giftedness until the day she died.
To Pentecostals, a gift was something to be used and used well, which meant the way the Lord intended. They had a saying in the church: “Your gift makes room for you.” Growing up, says Geraldine Gay Hambric, a member of the Chicago-based Gay Sisters gospel trio, she learned from her mother that Rosetta was blessed with a gift of music and that Mother Bell was “a born healer, a real preacher.” When their mother was pregnant with Geraldine, says Geraldine’s brother Elder Gregory Donald Gay, she pleaded with Katie, who sometimes stayed with the Gays, to pray for her baby. The prayers apparently worked. When Geraldine was born, Elder Gay says, “she began playing piano with no lessons.”
Katie, Geraldine recalls, occasionally wore a turban to set herself apart as a prophet. Rosetta, however, needed no special accoutrements to make her powers known. “I called [Rosetta’s playing] ‘fly,’ ” Geraldine says, noting that in those interwar years when gospel was developing in Chicago, “if you showed any kind of flyness with your music,” you received special attention. “And she was so advanced, the music that I’ve heard from her.”
“It was just her singing and her picking that guitar that just drew. You just got attached to it. She could really hit that, now,” remembers Musette Hubbard. “You can sing, and it’s a beautiful voice and everything, but if you sing with an understanding and the feeling of what you’re singing it’s altogether different. And that is what she did, more like to me. Even though she was young. It was a gift. Yes.”
According to a story Rosetta was especially fond of repeating, at her Fortieth Street debut she was still so small that Papa Roberts had to lift her atop the church piano so the congregation could catch a glimpse of the pint-sized “singing and guitar-playing miracle.” From that moment on, the members of the church couldn’t get enough of the little girl with the too-big-for-her guitar and even bigger voice. Most youngsters in the 1920s started out in the children’s choir, singing easy songs like “Yes, Jesus Loves Me.” But not Rosabell. “Most of her singing was alone,” says Musette Hubbard, explaining that, because she could accompany herself, Rosetta performed as a soloist from the start. “That guitar, I think, did a lot of it for her. See, you know, most of the times it’s a boy. Most of the time, as I said, the boys would be with the guitar and the drums, and the girl did the singing.”
Camille Roberts remembers putting a nickel of her own school money into a collection for Rosetta because “I liked to hear her sing.” “And when she, you know, picked the guitar particularly she’d sometimes close her eyes and her voice was coming, a little spirit was within her coming out of her mouth,” she adds. “You would become so enthralled with it, it was just, I don’t know the word to say for it, but she was very spiritual and very good.”
“Good” gospel singing was not necessarily a function of training as understood by traditional European art music standards; rather, it reflected the performer’s delivery, her ability to interpret the notes in a deeply felt, convincing way, while conveying confidence, security, and well-being.9 Perhaps as early as age seven or eight, but certainly by ten or eleven, Rosetta had this ability, such that the memories of her singing and playing are still fresh eighty years later. “I can just see her smile,” Camille Roberts says, smiling herself. “I couldn’t even describe it, but she had a bright smile, alive.”
Rosetta’s debut coincided with one of the most dynamic periods in the history of gospel music, which largely emerged from Chicago churches where Southern migrants worshiped. At roughly the same time she was balancing her adult-sized guitar on child-sized arms and shoulders, gospel was gaining a foothold as the most important black sacred music since the spirituals. Unlike the spirituals, however, gospel was largely a composed music. As a child, Rosetta sang the early gospel hymns of self-taught Baptist pianist-composer Lucie E. Campbell. She also performed songs written by Bishop C. H. Mason and other COGIC preachers, including Samuel Kelsey, the Washington, D.C.–based minister who would later become a friend and officiate at her third wedding.10
Before gospel’s most prolific and influential composer, Thomas A. Dorsey, and his colleague Sallie Martin made copyrighting and selling gospel sheet music the norm, in the early 1930s, most of these compositions went unpublished. Yet they traveled orally, through church revivals and state convocations, as well as the annual national COGIC convocation, held every November in Memphis, from which a Fortieth Street delegate might return with one or two new numbers for the gospel choir. The simplicity of these songs, with their straightforward melodies and lyrics based upon Biblical verse, not only allowed them to be transported over geographical distances through listeners’ memories, but also enabled congregations to put their own distinctive stamps on them. Gospel might have been formally composed, but in performance, gospel feeling prevailed.
Mother Bell’s strictness limited Rosetta’s exposure to Chicago’s booming secular music scene in the mid- and late 1920s, when the South Side pulsed with jazz, blues, and other popular sounds in clubs and speakeasies. “To be sanctified is to set yourself apart,” notes Geraldine Gay Hambric, voicing a central COGIC tenet. Ironically, however, this aspect of sanctification occasionally inflamed tensions with the more affluent, mainline Christians, who found Pentecostals snobbish in their self-distinction. Alva Roberts, who married Elder Roberts’s first son, Isaiah, remembers how young people in her neighborhood teased each other about their differences. The Pentecostal children, she recalls with a chuckle, would make fun of the Baptist children for singing their church songs slooooowwww. Meanwhile, “some of the Baptist kids would point me out and say, ‘She sanctified! She don’t go to shows!’ ” Indeed, neither she nor Rosabell—nor Musette Hubbard, Camille Roberts, or Geraldine Gay—was allowed to go to the theater or see movies. Even if they could afford them, most of the saints shunned radios in their homes, as well.
On the other hand, urban sanctified people enjoyed a rich and spiritually satisfying musical life within the church. “Outside” sounds were absorbed into the gospel blues, exemplified in the music of Dorsey, former pianist for blues queen Ma Rainey and author of such notably unholy compositions as “It’s Tight Like That.” Camille Roberts suspects that gospel music had much to do with her own mother’s attraction to the Church of God in Christ. Even as a small child in Atlanta, Camille says, she could tell that sanctified people “expressed joy, the same as if you were to hear a man sing a record or blues or something, and you would express it with the body, and that’s the way [my mother] would. . . . She’d come home and [through] her prayers she would express joy. . . . I really didn’t understand it until I came to Chicago Fortieth, and then I began to understand that the spirit was within you; you expressed it. If a song inspired you or you felt anything, you would express it, the same as a dance floor.”
In one of her earliest recording sessions, Rosetta sang “Something within Me,” communicating that joy that Camille had observed in her mother. Starting in Chicago, that “something” had become more than just a route to spiritual satisfaction for Rosetta; it had also become a means of survival. “When Rosetta was singing and people from other churches came to hear her, it was understood that the collection—which was not announced, just freely offered—was hers, and belonged to her. They would put it in an envelope and present it to her mother,” Camille says.
In Chicago, Rosetta also discovered music as a means of earning others’ approval. Although “it was like a leash,” recalls Camille, referring to Katie’s stringent protection of her daughter, Rosetta nevertheless grew to be outgoing. Raised by a mother who demanded obedience, she became playful and attention-seeking, not through acts of rebellion, but by entertaining others. In playing and singing, she found she could make people “happy,” in both the everyday sense and the Pentecostal sense of Holy Ghost–filled. Moreover, unlike other kinds of “acting up,” this kind was encouraged and rewarded.
In later life, Rosetta was known as a prankster, someone who would bend over backwards to get a laugh. As a woman among men, she compensated for not being one of the boys by showing the boys up with her boldness. Musically speaking, “Anything you can do I can do better”—the motto of Annie Get Your Gun’s Annie Oakley—became her motto, too. Instead of cultivating girlishness, taking a route more available to conventionally feminine and pretty black women, she fashioned an outrageous, fun personality to win others’ affection and love.
Brown-skinned and otherwise “ordinary looking” by the Chicagoans’ reckoning, Rosetta in childhood discovered the power of the smile Camille Roberts remembers. This instinct for performance was also part of her gift. In later years, she would give fans this smiling version of herself, not, as some might have thought, because she was stooping to stereotype, but because she believed that happiness was what people in or outside of the gospel world wanted in their entertainment.
Soon word of Rosetta spread to people outside of Fortieth Street, who would visit Sunday evening services just to hear her. In some cases, non-Pentecostals saw the saints themselves as objects of pleasurable diversion, but as often as not it was the sounds of the Sanctified Church that drew them in. “I was entranced by their stepped-up rhythms, tambourines, hand clapping, and uninhibited dynamics, rivaled only by Ma Rainey singing the blues at the old Monogram Theater,” recalled Langston Hughes, who heard gospel in Chicago in his teens, after World War I. “The music of these less formal Negro churches early took hold of me, moved me and thrilled me.”11 Although she probably never saw Rosetta at Fortieth Street, even “Mahalia Jackson . . . when she started, she used to come there and sit in the balcony to listen to us,” says Camille Roberts, not without pride.
Although Mahalia would sing with the early gospel group the Johnson Singers and then work with Dorsey at Pilgrim Baptist, she had always been taken with the sounds of the Sanctified Church. Prior to moving from New Orleans to Chicago in the mid-1920s, she had absorbed both the music of Bessie Smith and the music of Pentecostals. “Everybody sang and clapped and stomped their feet, sang with their whole bodies!” she recalled. “They had a beat, a powerful beat, a rhythm we held onto from slavery days, and their music was so strong and expressive it used to bring the tears to my eyes.”12
Not infrequently, the members of Pastor Roberts’s church would welcome a traveling missionary or evangelist-troubadour who also had a “powerful beat.” Of these, one made an indelible impression on Camille Roberts. “Along comes a woman, I can’t remember her name, but she was blind, and she was from Texas, and she could just make the piano talk, and she’d get so good she could hit it with her elbows, she could perform with it,” she recalls. Arizona Juanita Dranes (1894–1969), the woman Camille remembers so vividly, was a COGIC musician who combined thumping, barrelhouse- and ragtime-influenced piano with a wailing, unaffected voice that seemed to emanate from her core. In 1926, Dranes, a Texas native, traveled from Dallas to Chicago at the urging of executives at the Okeh label, who wanted to record her. She journeyed with a note from her hometown preacher, Elder E. M. Page, pinned onto her sweater. “Since she is deprived of her natural sight,” it read, “the Lord has given her a spiritual sight that all churches enjoy.”13 The note might have added that she had invented—possibly single-handedly—Sanctified piano style. Dranes used the piano as a distinct voice; she didn’t merely play chords to back up her singing. The resulting sound was complex and polyrhythmic, its intricacy tempered by the directness of her singing.
When Rosetta heard Dranes, first in Chicago and later at COGIC convocations, she must have been exalted by the sounds of this spirited older woman who needed no accompaniment but her own. As Rosetta matured as an artist, her own playing would come to bear the imprint of Dranes’s style, including her physical connection to her instrument. “It was rather like the blues singers,” says gospel expert Horace Clarence Boyer, describing self-accompanying gospel musicians. “When you moved, your instrument moved with you.” In Boyer’s opinion, Arizona was the only woman who “rocked the world like Rosetta,” although Dranes’s reputation stayed primarily within the Church of God in Christ. Rosetta, in contrast, would burst out of these boundaries. First, however, she once again had to put on her “travelin’ shoes.”
* * *
“ROCK ME———OOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHH RRRRRRRoooocccckkkk—m-ee-Rock me in the cradle of Thy Love” sang the ragged little girl in semi-jazzy rhythm while her companions kept time by clapping their hands and stomping their feet. The singer, a girl of some ten or twelve years, rocked and swayed as she sang in her entrancing throaty voice. . . . Her head was thrown back and her eyes closed and she seemed to put her whole soul into her singing—one is tempted to say the song seemed to be a part of her soul.
Such was the picture of a Chicago street musician painted by George D. Lewis, a writer researching “Spirituals of Today” for the New Deal–era Illinois Writers Project.14 The girl singing Thomas Dorsey’s “Hide Me in Thy Bosom” is not Rosetta, but Lewis’s description of her as she attracts spectators of different races, at the intersection of Thirty-fifth and Dearborn, squares with Rosetta’s likely experience in her early adolescence. When she and Katie Bell began their lives as traveling evangelists, they joined a tradition of Pentecostal singer-guitarists, such as Blind Willie McTell, who made their living saving souls at street meetings, house meetings, or storefront performances. The portability of stringed instruments like guitar and mandolin gave such makers of black sacred music, like the itinerant blues singers, a freedom to move about. On the road with her daughter, Katie Bell preached, joining Rosetta in singing and playing. Sometimes a soul would be saved; at other times, they would receive material payment in the form of nickels, dimes, or quarters tossed into a makeshift offering plate.
For Rosetta, joining her evangelist mother meant an end to her formal education. Musette Hubbard can’t say for certain, but she doubts that Rosetta moved on with her to junior high; others say she might not have completed the sixth grade. In any case, some time before her twelfth birthday, evangelizing, not school, became Rosetta’s full-time work. Alva Roberts clearly recalls how Katie Bell and Rosetta “labored . . . over on the West Side, in that particular area, they used to call it Jewtown.” The area Alva remembers was the Maxwell Street Market, a Jewish ghetto where, on Sunday afternoons, street vendors peddled their wares. Inexpensive clothing and a racially and ethnically diverse street-fair atmosphere drew South Siders over to the market. There, among crowds including recently arrived Southern blues musicians and other evangelists, Rosetta and Katie held street meetings, while black families like Alva’s milled about, enjoying a weekly Polish sausage. A young Rosetta would have overheard the sounds of early Chicago blues on Maxwell Street, a vibrant urban space where gospel had to compete for people’s attention with other forms of musical entertainment.
Although they remained members of Fortieth Street, Rosetta and Katie Bell probably began traveling outside the northern Midwest by the late 1920s—one reason why Rosetta is generally not considered part of the seminal Chicago gospel scene that included Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, Roberta Martin, Sallie Martin, and so many others. Instead, mother and daughter set out on the nascent “gospel highway,” a loose conglomeration of churches, revivals, tent meetings, and convocations. The Depression was no impediment to religious enthusiasm; indeed, the disproportionate economic hardship suffered by black people after the 1929 stock market crash may well have caused many to turn to religion as an anodyne to despair. “People would say, bring that little girl over who plays that guitar. They would give her fifty cents,” recalls Geraldine Gay Hambric. If, on the other hand, Mother Bell ran a revival, Geraldine says, she could make one hundred dollars for two weeks, not including the meals and housing that the saints would generally chip in. This at a time when, as Alva Roberts recalls, a black woman making ten dollars a week in domestic service in Chicago was doing “real good.”
On the other hand, the gospel circuit was sometimes unpredictable, more akin to what secular artists unromantically call “paying dues.” The saints could be skinflints, and opportunities abounded for fraud. Once, Geraldine Gay Hambric says, she toured with an aunt who posed as Elder Lucy Smith, a popular Chicago singing evangelist who, incidentally, also claimed to have constructed the city’s first “black-built” church.15 The aunt was not only a charlatan but a cheat, refusing to share her earnings fairly with her niece. At other times, back home in Chicago, Geraldine’s gift earned her the “honor” of playing piano from early Sunday morning to as late as ten or eleven at night. If the church was a nice one, she says, she would sometimes allow herself to fall asleep, spent, on the cushioned pews.
Performing at revivals required special concentration and stamina. Unlike staged performances, revivals were unrehearsed events, sometimes throwing together performers unaccustomed to each other’s routines. The preacher would say “It’s nobody’s fault but mine,” and that would be Rosetta’s cue to jump into the song. Conversely, Rosetta would have to know when to interrupt the preacher, especially if she sensed attention spans flagging. Thus, in addition to developing her distinct musical voice, Rosetta had to hone an intuition for timing and performance, knowing how and when to assert herself musically without undermining a male preacher’s authority.
Tent meetings and revivals in the 1930s shaped Rosetta’s musical techniques. On the road with Katie Bell, she learned how to project over the cacophony of shouting, crying, and singing worshipers. Following Arizona Dranes on the piano, she developed a Sanctified gospel guitar style that emphasized the picking of individual notes as a counterpoint to her voice. This, too, was a strategy for being heard, for acoustic guitars, unlike pianos, possessed little if any resonance. A note was played, and as quickly as it became audible, it vanished. Plucking individual notes, and plucking them quickly, served not only as a form of visual entertainment, but also as a way of filling the otherwise dead space between vocal phrases. Rosetta also worked on the technique of embellishing a song with improvised lyrics or vocal interpolations, something which later became one of her trademarks. For example, when she got to the line “I ain’t gonna study war no more,” in “Down by the Riverside,” she would make audiences whoop and holler with her “no no no no no no!”
Rosetta’s talent for moving an audience arose from feeling as well as showmanship—a word that has no feminine equivalent in the English language. Every aspect of her playing and singing was Spirit-driven, and yet consciously calculated at the same time, just as the saints at Pentecostal services act in ways that are simultaneously spontaneous and scripted by custom. In church, the women tend to “fall out” at particular moments—not, for example, at the beginning of the service, but in the middle of the preacher’s sermon, supplanting his voice with their own. As such moments show, sincerity and convention in religious experience can and do go hand in hand.16
Rosetta and Katie Bell traveled together through Rosetta’s late teenage years. It was likely on the Pentecostal Church circuit that Rosetta met an itinerant COGIC preacher, Thomas J. Tharpe, whom she married in Chicago on November 17, 1934. Not much is known about Tommy; some say he was from St. Augustine, Florida, others New York. Whatever the case, Camille Roberts knows that he was a stranger to Fortieth Street when Pastor Roberts performed the wedding ceremony. By then married herself, Camille stood with Rosetta as she swore before God to honor and obey her husband. “She didn’t have a big wedding,” Camille recalls. “It was not that popular at that time. We couldn’t afford weddings, and she couldn’t, because I don’t remember a father; it was just she and her mother.”
Rosetta’s name on the official marriage license—“Rosie Etta Bell Nuben”—suggests that by the time of her daughter’s betrothal, Katie had herself remarried, although the absence of what Camille calls “a father” suggests that he was absent, or, more likely, that the marriage itself had ended, either through divorce or death. Nevertheless, Katie Harper went by the name Katie Bell Nubin (with an “i”) for the rest of her life.
Elder Thomas and Rosetta Tharpe made a compelling husband-and-wife team. He preached, and she sang and played guitar; occasionally, he joined her on the ukulele. Most of the time they traveled with Katie Bell, but occasionally they journeyed separately, as Mother Nubin set out on her own evangelizing. Largely because of his wife’s gift, the two became a familiar presence on the gospel highway. They were an especially popular attraction in southern Florida, where they ran revivals at Miami Temple, the area’s most prominent COGIC church in the 1930s. Miami was an attractive base not only because of the number of COGIC congregations in the region, but because itinerants like Rosetta and Tommy could sit out the long Northern winters there.
“People talked about how [Tommy Tharpe] lived a pretty clean life,” says Reverend Isaac Cohen, whose father, the Reverend Amaziah Melvin Cohen, established Miami Temple. “He was a great preacher. . . . He looked serious to me. He looked like a man who meant business.” Others who knew Rosetta later in life take Isaac Cohen’s commercial metaphor literally. Ira Tucker Jr., son and namesake of the legendary lead singer of the Dixie Hummingbirds, characterizes the marriage as a business transaction. “It was a deal, it was a deal,” says Ira Junior, who grew up around Rosetta and Ma Bell in the 1950s and ’60s. “And see, I think that’s what influenced [Rosetta] throughout her life, was that it was very hard for her to separate her personal life from a deal. Do you know what I mean? It was a deal with Russell [Rosetta’s third husband]. And I think most of the time, the men in her life, it turned out to be some type of deal, you know, an arrangement, some situation that, you know, if it’s going to work for you, then it’s going to work for me too.” Marie Knight, Rosetta’s singing partner in the 1940s and ’50s and one of her closest confidantes, suggests that Tommy Tharpe wanted to attach himself to Rosetta’s rising star. “He was a young minister and he had no publicity about him,” she says, suggesting a pattern according to which Rosetta, however savvy, allowed men to use her for their profit.
Zeola Cohen Jones, a cousin of A. M. Cohen and a member of Miami Temple, says Tommy Tharpe was a tall, good-looking man reputed to be a good preacher. Even so, according to Zeola, Ma Bell didn’t approve of Tommy, seeing him as a man who didn’t live according to his words. Others soon grew wary of him as well; the Miami Temple grapevine had it that he was “seeing” someone in a different state. As a child, Zeola was an unwitting witness to Tommy’s cruelty. “I was seeing him chase Rosetta down the street [at night] and fight her,” she recalls. “And then the thing that was amusing, he would get up in church [the next day] and preach, and she would sing like nothing happened. Some things get embedded in a child’s mind. I knew how he would beat her, but she loved him.”
Roxie Moore, who met Rosetta at a revival Tommy and Rosetta ran at Rehoboth Beach Church of God in Christ, in Baltimore, corroborates Zeola’s memories. Like Zeola, Roxie had an early suspicion that Tommy Tharpe had a girlfriend on the side. When Rosetta finally came around to realizing this, she was shattered—nothing in her life to that point had prepared her for such a blow. Because Tommy was a preacher, his deceit posed a fundamental challenge to her belief in the sheltering haven of her church.
Tommy and Rosetta stayed together, however—at least initially. As late as 1937, when Roxie met them, their home base was still Miami. “The people came really to hear her sing, not to hear him preach,” says Zeola, recalling how Rosetta would get them going with her rollicking version of “Hide Me in Thy Bosom,” in which she trilled the “r” in “rock me.” “In the 1930s, Rosetta was the most popular singer there,” says Isaac Cohen. “People noticed and responded to her playing.” He particularly recalls her version of “Sit Down,” an uptempo favorite about being so filled with the Holy Spirit that you can’t stay in your seat.
Rosetta’s stardom in south Florida only increased when the Reverend Amaziah Cohen began broadcasting Sunday night programs on WKAT, a white station that featured news and pop music. Rosetta’s voice and guitar quickly became a leading attraction on the radio, and soon white people began attending live broadcasts at Miami Temple. “The people at night would come from all areas; sometimes, we had more whites in the church than blacks,” recalls Isaac Cohen. The visitors, including many Jews, sat in a horseshoe balcony, while church members gathered on the main floor, up front. Eventually, Elder Cohen says, the church established a policy of a mandatory offering, “because we didn’t have room for everyone.” Some guests dressed in accordance with church convention, others in ways that church members found disrespectful—the women wearing pants or showing up without stockings.
Frictions between black members and white guests surfaced in other ways. The members of Miami Temple viewed the Sunday night broadcasts as entertaining religious worship, especially when Rosetta Tharpe was singing, but the visitors often treated the worship itself as entertainment. Zeola Jones remembers feeling discomfort with the arrangement:
The Jews from Miami Beach would come to our church every Sunday night to hear [Rosetta] sing. It would be packed with the winter Jews [vacationers from up north]. . . . They came in droves to our church. Buses and limousines. They didn’t mind parking in the ghetto for that. They weren’t afraid.
When the saints would shout they would throw money down at them. It was, let’s go see these niggers. It was amusement to them.
The memory of it still angers her. “When they would see them shouting they would just laugh and carry on and throw money.” Moreover, when the church started charging admission to take advantage of all of the outsiders who came on Sundays, “the poor people couldn’t attend”—although she recalls, laughing, how some black members of Miami Temple made a point of coming to Sunday-night broadcasts just to catch that money. “You know they would come out on Sunday. They would jump to get that money!” What is bittersweet about Zeola’s memories of those days—the whites throwing money were also funding church renovations and an active college fund—cannot compensate for their ugliness. “I didn’t like it,” she says emphatically. “They wouldn’t do that now.”
Around 1938, Rosetta decided to step off the path that had been laid for her by her marriage, her church, and social convention. She made the radical decision to leave the church for a secular career. Zeola attributes the move in part to marital problems, in part to the enticements of white people who came to Miami Temple with “money and promises.”
The next time the members of Fortieth Street or Miami Temple heard word of Rosabell, she was “Sister Rosetta Tharpe,” Decca recording artist. “The church was hurt that she would leave the church and go into the world,” says Zeola Jones. Camille Roberts and Alva Roberts also felt let down. “We knew she went out of the church, as they called it,” says Camille. “That was the word that was coming back to the church, that she was mixing popular songs with church spirituals.” Alva recalls, “When I heard her I said, my goodness, you mean she’s gone into the world playing music like the world music?”
Camille can only speculate, but she suspects that Rosetta may have felt that worldly pull all along. “She would sing a line, and she would put a little hmmmm into the end of it, and it just look like you could just feast off that little hmmmm. I think that’s why she moved out into the world, because she couldn’t [help but] put a little oompf into the song. Now they’re doing it, but when she started it, that was when you were getting away from religion.”
Rosetta’s gift would indeed “make room” for her—lots of room. But by 1938, it would also begin to estrange her from the very communities that had looked after that gift as their own.