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FROM SPIRITUALS TO SWING (1938–1940)

Rock Me (v.): send me, kill me, move me with rhythm.

The New Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary

We will probably never know exactly how Rosietta Atkins Tharpe—as she was then calling herself—made the leap from a COGIC church in Miami to the stage of the Cotton Club, New York City’s most renowned nightspot. Certainly Rosetta was acutely aware of the feelings of disappointment, bewilderment, and betrayal her move stirred among the Pentecostal saints; indeed, regret might explain why, in later years, she tended to gloss over the details of this second “great migration” in her young life. Like her first migration from Cotton Plant to Chicago, the move from Miami Temple to the Cotton Club involved geographical dislocation, but it entailed cultural dislocation of an altogether different order. In the 1920s and 1930s, hundreds of thousands of black Southerners collectively took a gamble on “the North” as a land of freedom and opportunity. Only one—Rosetta Tharpe—had the boldness to bring gospel, the sacred musical expression of that migration, from the churches and street meetings where it developed to the stages of New York concert halls, ballrooms, and nightclubs.

For Rosetta, leaving the church to pursue a secular career was inseparable from leaving Tommy Tharpe; she knew that her husband couldn’t pursue his career and condone her move. And yet her unhappiness in her marriage may not have been Rosetta’s only motivation. To someone who had grown up wearing secondhand shoes and donated clothes, the promise of money must have been powerfully seductive. Rosetta apparently “thought the [Cotton Club] management was kidding” when, after her initial success, it proposed to pay her a weekly salary of five hundred dollars.¹ With few such lucrative opportunities open to black performers, the sacrilegious thought may well have crossed Rosetta’s mind that some worldly opportunities were worth pursuing.

Accounts of Rosetta in those early years provide only the vaguest outline of the circumstances of her “arrival” (as the newspapers called it). According to the Chicago Defender, “She was induced to come to New York, where she cast her lot with a large Holy Roller church. One day some one suggested that she might try her talent in one of the amateur shows. She did and from that time on she has been going places.” A slightly different version of this story appeared in the New York Amsterdam Star-News, Harlem’s major newspaper, which reported that Rosetta had been “discovered” in the summer of 1938, while she and her husband were working at A. M. Cohen’s church. As for who exactly had done the discovering, the Star-News cited Rosetta as saying that “Blanche Gabbie, a white woman,” had heard her on A. M. Cohen’s radio broadcasts and live at Miami Temple. “Why, she talked me right into Broadway,” Rosetta is said to have quipped.²

As Rosetta became more accustomed to celebrity, she occasionally offered more farfetched accounts. In a 1941 interview, she claimed that “her agent” had “interested her in coming to New York,” but only after she had rejected a scholarship to Alabama State Teachers College after graduating from high school “with highest marks.” A different Defender piece than the one that had her entering “amateur shows” explained that she had been “brought up” for an audition before Cotton Club stage manager Herman Stark “by a booking agent who had learned of her singing through an office worker who happened to pause in front of the church [in Harlem] where Miss Tharpe was singing.”³

Rumors also circulated that a “famous” male musician had plucked Rosetta from obscurity. “Several big shots along Broadway and in Harlem . . . claim her discovery,” one article suggested. “Among them are two of the best known band leaders in the business.” A couple of accounts credited Cab Calloway with signing Rosetta after he heard her singing (one locates the “discovery” in New York, the other at Miami COGIC), although Calloway, vocal about his role in jump-starting the careers of Lena Horne and Pearl Bailey, never confirmed the story.⁴

It’s likely that Rosetta was not the only source of such inconsistencies, given the low music journalism standards of the day and the tendency of agents and managers to promulgate stories merely for publicity’s sake. And yet, taken together, the elisions, ambiguities, and occasional flat-out implausibilities of these stories point at the failure of Rosetta or the press to come up with a viable “crossover” narrative for her—a way of presenting her as an authentic Pentecostal while explaining how she had turned up at the Cotton Club. Once, Rosetta told a reporter that “when she was a little girl, she dreamed of a theatrical career,”⁵ and if this is true, then her move outside the church represented the realization of an old, if suppressed, desire. In general, however, Rosetta portrayed herself as being lured to take a bite of the Big Apple. She may indeed have felt forced to choose between two equally impossible outcomes: divorce from Tommy Tharpe or leaving the church.

Yet Rosetta did choose; no husband or mother forced her to sing in nightclubs where the patrons smoke and drank, and the dancers wore little more than G-strings. Perhaps this is why, in an early interview, she called herself Rosetta Vashti Tharpe.⁶ The name came from the Old Testament book of Esther, in which Queen Vashti, wife of King Ahasuerus, refuses to obey her husband’s command to parade herself before his guests at a banquet. The king’s sages determine that Vashti’s refusal not only has insulted the king, but has endangered the stability of the entire society, which obliges women to “give honor to their husbands, high and low alike.”⁷ The reference to Vashti—a name she would periodically return to over the years—hinted at Rosetta’s awareness of her “disobedience” to Tommy Tharpe and to the Church of God in Christ itself.

From Cotton Plant to the Cotton Club. The juxtaposition of the racially and socially stratified Arkansas town of Rosetta’s birth with the racially and socially stratified New York nightclub where she debuted was more than a little ironic, considering that the entertainment concept behind the latter was the antebellum plantation of “Swanee River” nostalgia. Yet the image of bucolic slavery days was precisely the source of the Cotton Club’s charm. Indeed, the name Cotton Club, and all that the South’s most important cash crop once stood for—national economic prosperity, the promise of industrialization, the expansion of the U.S. empire—appealed to white patrons during the lean and joyless years of Prohibition and the Depression, even to Northerners who had never seen a cotton plant.

The admissions policy of the Cotton Club—no blacks allowed, with rare exceptions for visiting celebrity-performers, whose parties nevertheless sat in tables at the rear—mirrored the ambiance and themes of the shows. The original bandstand, as Calloway recalled, “was a replica of a southern mansion, with large white columns and a backdrop painted with weeping willows and slave quarters.”⁸ The Duke Ellington Band in the early days played “jungle jazz” to complement “African” set pieces, in which the “jungle” sounds sometimes derived from the horn players’ use of modified toilet plungers in the bells of their instruments.⁹ Meanwhile, advertisements boasted “tall, tan and terrific” chorus girls as staples of Cotton Club revues. For all of its elegance, the club had a distinctly vaudevillian streak, mixing song, dance, comedy, and novelty acts, from conga numbers to contortionists.

The club’s performers took umbrage at its perpetuation of racial stereotypes and its racially discriminatory policy at the door. Yet “some of the proudest Negro musicians in the world played there and adhered to that policy of racial segregation,” recalled college-educated Calloway in 1976. Stars of the Cotton Club revues in the 1920s and ’30s included Ellington, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Ethel Waters, the Nicholas Brothers, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. “So far as we were concerned,” wrote Ellington, whose band began playing there in late 1927, “the engagement at the Cotton Club was of the utmost significance, because as a result of its radio wire we were heard nationally and internationally. . . . The Cotton Club was a classy spot. Impeccable behavior was demanded in the room while the show was going on.”¹⁰

The Cotton Club that has entered popular legend of the twenty-first century is the glamorous nightspot portrayed in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 The Cotton Club, with its colorful cast of high-society types, burly mobsters, striving black musicians, and exacting white stage managers. Located at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, the original Cotton Club was established in 1923 as a place where well-heeled white audiences could venture “uptown”—in those days, a code word for the neighborhoods above 110th Street. In 1935, however, Harlem erupted in riots caused by frustrations over unemployment, high housing costs, and poor public services, and the owners of the Harlem club closed its doors, since its white clientele now considered the neighborhood dangerous. Undaunted, they reestablished the club in a top-floor room in a building at Forty-eighth and Broadway, which, in a former incarnation, had been the Ubangi Club, a short-lived nightspot where popular black lesbian entertainer Gladys Bentley performed in male drag, complete with top hat and cane.

The Cotton Club where Rosetta appeared thus was located in the relatively more humdrum heart of the Great White Way, as the illuminated Broadway theater district was known. That didn’t affect the quality of its clientele, however. Among those who caught Rosetta’s act in the opening nights of the fall 1939 revue were Mary Martin, J. Edgar Hoover, and Nate Blumberg, president of Universal Pictures.¹¹

Much nevertheless had changed in popular music between the 1923 unveiling of the Harlem club and its relocation to Broadway in 1936, years that coincided with Rosetta’s development from a child prodigy to a highly sought-after performer on the Pentecostal circuit. For one thing, the meaning of “swing” had changed. Originally, musicians considered swing a quality of musical performance; as Ivie Anderson, singing for the Ellington band, had put it, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” By the time the Broadway Cotton Club launched its first show, however, swing itself had become a thing. Whereas formerly one might describe a band with a good rhythm section as “swinging,” now it was much more common to read and talk about “swing bands” and “swing musicians.”

The Swing Era, as it became known, coincided with relatively productive and progressive years in U.S. popular culture, a time when the political left, most notably the Communist Party, exerted unprecedented influence on everything from music to drama to literature. Yet even amid a general cultural move leftward, the new Cotton Club continued to trade on the myth of the Old South.

It was a myth fortified by the 1939 Hollywood blockbuster Gone with the Wind, which left generations of Americans pining for a mythical plantation called Tara, even as it made Hattie McDaniel the first black winner of an Academy Award.

More to the point, amid trends toward integration within popular music culture, increased liberalism on race issues, and mounting domestic concern about the rise of Hitler and Nazism—a topic of particular alarm among African Americans after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939—the club persisted in enforcing a racially exclusive admissions policy. Indeed, the club’s setup only reinforced whites’ social license to regard black bodies, especially scantily clad women, as spectacles—and to do so at a time when analogous acts of “looking” not infrequently got black men lynched. Like the nineteenth-century minstrel stage, the Cotton Club offered whites proximity to black people, but did little to change the terms of the racial hierarchy. Nowhere was this better illustrated than in the mural commissioned for the opening of the Broadway club. It imagined the popular white swing bandleaders of the day—in blackface.¹²

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, as she was professionally billed (the “i” in Rosietta having been permanently dropped), was not supposed to be a highlight of the fall 1938 Cotton Club revue, a fast-paced affair headlining Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers, young dancers who thrilled audiences with their acrobatic elegance. Originally she was just a gamble, signed by Herman Stark for two weeks. Like another new attraction, the Dandridge Sisters—a singing group that included a promising fourteen-year-old named Dorothy—Rosetta constituted one part of a huge supporting cast, performers who largely filled time between the big numbers. Early print advertisements did not mention her name.

Yet from the outset, audiences were thrilled by Rosetta’s unusual sound and style. Unaccustomed to the emotionally expressive music of Pentecostals, newspaper reporters, white and black, struggled for the right words to describe her. Most used some variation of “swing” to convey the rhythmic quality of her music, calling her a “swinger of spirituals,” a “spiritual swinging favorite,” a “hymn swinging evangelist,” and a “hymnswinger.” Others, drawn to the novelty value of a Pentecostal performer, christened her a “religious shouter,” a “Holy Roller Singer,” and a “Holy-roller entertainer.” The Chicago Defender called her “a swingcopated manipulator of loud blue tones” and noted that “she handles the guitar rather creditably in accompaniment.”¹³

Still others compared Rosetta to Bessie Smith, the blues singer whose career was cut short by a 1937 car accident.¹⁴ Like Smith, Rosetta presented a compelling picture of black female self-assurance and vigor when she performed. Indeed, her “gospel blues” and Smith’s secular blues were not all that distinct. Musically, both sprang from sources in slave culture, and both confronted the harshness of the world with determination to “make a way outta no way.” For gospel singers, this “way” was through God; for blues singers, it was through self-reliance.

Shortly after her name began appearing in the newspapers that October, Rosetta acquired a talent manager. He was Moe Gale, born Moses Galewski, influential head of Gale management, a top talent agency, and owner of Harlem’s famous Savoy Ballroom. Gale arranged to have Rosetta photographed by James J. Kriegsmann, official photographer to the Cotton Club stars, with offices at the Actors’ Equity Building at 165 West Forty-sixth Street.

Rosetta showed up with her National resonating guitar and her own gown. By Cotton Club standards, which practically mandated sequins, feathers, rhinestones, and midriff-exposing outfits for women, it was modest. It featured a quiet print, billowy shoulders, and sweet, pleated detailing around the neckline and down the bodice. Her hair had been curled with a hot iron, in a cute rather than come-hither style, and she wore no jewelry. Kriegsmann, who used overhead lights to illuminate her face, casting sharp, visually arresting shadows behind her, posed Rosetta smiling, hands on the strings of her guitar, glancing upward with wide-open eyes. The only elements undermining the image of Rosetta as a Pentecostal singer appear in the form of carefully plucked eyebrows and subtle traces of makeup—a touch of lipstick and perhaps a bit of defining kohl around the eyes.

Kriegsmann took many photographs of Rosetta during their session, but this one—or variations of it so similar that the differences are barely perceptible—would be the most reproduced. It also established Rosetta’s guitar as an indelible element of her image. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the picture of Rosetta looking at ease with her instrument carried special significance. As the scholar Sherrie Tucker has shown, most images of the women swing musicians who came to prominence as members of “all-girl” bands in the 1940s pictured their instruments as ornaments, rather than as drums, saxophones, trumpets, or trombones they actually played.¹⁵ In contrast, even if Rosetta was not actually picking a note at the moment Kriegsmann snapped the photograph, she was definitely not holding her guitar as decoration, like a bride awkwardly holding a bunch of lilies to her cheek in a wedding photograph.

A very different picture taken by Kriegsmann during that photo session occasionally did appear in the press, but never came close to enjoying the same iconic status as the photograph of Rosetta with her National steel resonating guitar. It was an alter ego to the image of Rosetta as the cheerful ingénue: a shot in which a determined, even somber-looking woman stares off into the middle distance, closed-lipped and unsmiling. That photograph, too, would be a harbinger of things to come.

James J. Kriegsmann publicity photograph of Rosetta Tharpe, circa late 1938 or early 1939. Photograph courtesy the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

From October to December 1938, events of profound and lasting significance to Rosetta’s career occurred almost weekly. The first involved the copyrighting of her material. Irving Mills, at one point the agent of Calloway, Ellington, and a group called the Mills Blue Rhythm Band—later to become the band of one Lucius “Lucky” Millinder—approached Rosetta in mid-October and soon had her signed to an “exclusive publishing contract” with Mills Music. A company with an international distribution network, Mills Music quickly published Eighteen Original Negro Spirituals, an impressive booklet (with the smiling Kriegsmann portrait on the cover) containing songs “with an original and appealing religious quality set down exactly as sung by Sister Tharpe since infancy in Negro churches all over the country.” Encompassing such titles as “I Look Down the Road and I Wonder,” “My Lord and I,” “Saviour, Don’t Pass Me By,” “That’s All,” and “This Train,” Eighteen Original Negro Spirituals would serve as a crucial source of Rosetta’s repertoire for the next thirty-five years.

Music publishing was important—as early gospel entrepreneurs such as Dorsey and Sallie Martin well understood—but it didn’t have the glamour of sound recordings. Some of that glamour became Rosetta’s when she signed a contract the same month with Decca Records. J. Mayo “Ink” Williams, head of the label’s “race” division, managed such Decca notables as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Chick Webb, and Ella Fitzgerald. In 1938, however, the label was better known to the masses of record buyers as the label of white musicians Bing Crosby, Connie Boswell, and Guy Lombardo. It was also known for undercutting the competition, charging thirty-five cents per disk at a time when the going rate was seventy-five.

Decca had recorded four sides by Mahalia Jackson in May 1937, but they did so poorly that the label dropped her and didn’t venture back into the gospel field until it took a chance on Rosetta seventeen months later. With her bell-like voice, winning smile, and Cotton Club notoriety, Rosetta had the combination of the musical goods and showbiz flair that Mahalia had lacked. Her first 78s, recorded in a single session on October 31, 1938, with Rosetta accompanying herself on guitar, were instant successes. How successful they were in hard numbers is difficult to say, but successful enough to bring Rosetta back for a second session in January 1939 and to keep her in Decca’s employ, without interruption, until the mid-1950s. It’s also likely that her early recordings did well with white record buyers, since Decca did something it normally didn’t do with black artists: after she had produced four hit 78s, the label collected the shellac disks together in a deluxe boxed “album.”

Rosetta’s first session reveals a young woman capable of finding and communicating the emotional core of a song through exquisite phrasing, inventive vocal technique, and guitar playing of originality, confidence, and grace. Her years of using her gift in live performance had taught her how to make a listener feel a song, not just hear it, by making use of vibrato, trills, enunciation, dynamic variety (variations in loudness), and melisma, a gospel hallmark in which the vocalist sings several notes within the space of a single syllable. Like a blues or jazz singer, Rosetta tended to sing around the beat rather than on top of it, allowing for rhythmic complexity and improvisation. Like a blues singer, too, she was capable of covering material of enormous topical and emotional variety. Her first four cuts for Decca range widely in tone, from the sassy satire of “That’s All” to the wistful contentment of “My Man and I” to the extroverted exuberance of “Rock Me” and the longing of “The Lonesome Road.” All bore the mark of a singer-player of extraordinary control and personality.

As a first recording, “Rock Me,” the Dorsey song Rosetta had been singing since her Chicago days, and the one Zeola Cohen Jones remembers as a favorite at Miami Temple, was a logical choice. Presumably following the way she was singing it at the Cotton Club, Rosetta made a single significant change in the lyric on the record, substituting the word “swinging” where Dorsey had written “singing.” That single added “w”—in the very first line of the very first song that would introduce Rosetta to the wider world—signaled an important shift in her identity. To “swing” was to revel in rhythm, to feel the beat in your body, an experience that facilitated proximity to God in the context of Pentecostal worship—but in the context of a popular record, it belonged to what Rosetta’s old Chicago church called the “worldly world.”

Moreover, although Rosetta had been putting her signature stress on the words “rock me” since at least the mid-1930s, the juicy growl she produces on the Decca disk—on which “rock me” comes out as “rrrrrrock me”—opens up the meaning of the phrase to various secular interpretations. In Dorsey’s lyric, the phrase is a prayer addressed to a parent-deity who cares for His child, but as Rosetta sings it, “rock me” is an appeal to the gods of rhythm. The white trade magazine Variety took “rock me” as a reference to intercourse, saying her lyrics had “a slay-’em innuendo.” Rosetta was not a stranger to sexual double entendre—no one working at the Cotton Club for so long as a week could have been—yet “rock me” makes more sense as a call for delivery from worldly cares through music.

It’s tempting to read the other three songs Rosetta recorded during that first session as expressions of her emotional turmoil regarding Tommy Tharpe. In “That’s All,” Rosetta rewrote Washington Phillips’s “Denomination Blues” as a funny take on religious poseurs, people who claim to “have religion” but never quite walk the talk. To make her point, she daringly rhymed “well” with “hell,” describing ministers who would let their congregations go to the Devil if it served their self-interest. “My Man and I,” a tender version of her “My Lord and I” from Eighteen Original Negro Spirituals, is a paean to romantic love based on camaraderie, shared values, and gender equality. And in her version of “The Lonesome Road,” she sang in a lower part of her soprano register, conjuring the sound of the blues women, who similarly sang about lost romance with a compelling mixture of grief and grit.¹⁶

Notable gigs followed closely upon Rosetta’s 1938 Cotton Club engagement and the release of her first records. In early December, although still under contract to Stark, she did a week-long “by courtesy” stint with the Count Basie Band at the Paramount Theater in midtown. Later that month, she appeared at the Apollo Theater’s Christmas fundraiser, an annual event that brought together everyone from Fats Waller and Lionel Hampton to Fredi Washington, the Four Ink Spots, Noble Sissle, Artie Shaw, and Hazel Scott. And on December 23, she appeared before a sold-out Carnegie Hall audience for From Spirituals to Swing, one of the most historically significant musical events of the first half of the twentieth century.

John Hammond, the force behind the concert, was the son of a Vanderbilt, but he was also a Yale dropout who maintained open ties to the Communist Party. He possessed an excellent ear, and had curated the concert to reflect a preference for music that had little exposure among cultural tastemakers, the white elites as well as the black “talented tenth,” who were often more comfortable with Bach than with the blues. Hammond himself tended to equate a lack of commercial exposure with musical authenticity. The detailed program handed out to ticket holders promised an evening of “the music nobody knows,” and the concert was dedicated to Bessie Smith.

To Hammond’s mind, From Spirituals to Swing had a vital social mission that went beyond its basic concept of presenting a diverse lineup of African American performers to an integrated audience at a high-culture venue. Indeed, Hammond had a vision of the concert as a sort of “populist challenge” to racism.¹⁷ His only problem, initially, was that no organization—not excepting the NAACP—would go near it. Eventually, he got sponsorship from the Communist Party organ The New Masses for a show that included blues shouters Jimmy Rushing and Joe Turner, the North Carolina–based quartet Mitchell’s Christian Singers, boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons, jazz soloist Sidney Bechet, and a star-studded swing band led by Count Basie, a Hammond favorite.

Rosetta appeared before the sold-out Carnegie Hall crowd in an early segment titled “Spirituals and Holy Roller Hymns,” which followed an introduction featuring African tribal music as well as a number by Count Basie and His Orchestra. She sang two songs, “Rock Me” and “That’s All,” accompanied by her guitar and boogie-woogie piano provided by Ammons, a Chicagoan known for his “hot” sound. (The program noted that he “doesn’t read a note of music.”) Preserved for posterity, these songs are as close as we will ever get to hearing what she might have sounded like on the Cotton Club stage. And indeed, she is even better on these recordings than on her 78s, projecting an ease and a joy in performing that studio disks could not match. Her voice that night was huge and clear, and she had no trouble keeping up with Ammons, trading finger-picked guitar riffs with his bursts of pulsing piano. She even had the confidence to play with the audience, which spent the entire performance eagerly straining forward in their seats, moving in time to her rhythms. She began “That’s All” with a bit of fancy picking. Then she stopped, abruptly, when the crowd didn’t expect her to. Her reward was laughter, and at that moment, when she was assured of everyone’s attention, she and Ammons launched into a fast-paced rendition of the song. She got a second laugh when she omitted the anticipated “well/hell” rhyme of the lyric, as though to say with a wink, “This is Carnegie Hall, after all.”

By popular consensus, the performance was a triumph. As Basie remembered, “She sang some gospel songs that brought the house down. She sang down-home church numbers and had those old cool New Yorkers almost shouting in the aisles. There were a lot of people out there who had never heard that kind of singing, but she went over big.” The memory of Rosetta remained fresh a half-century later to Harry “Sweets” Edison, trumpeter with the Basie band. “I also remember Sister Rosetta Tharpe,” he said. “She was one of the greatest spiritual singers you ever heard . . . and a good guitar player!” Looking back, even Hammond himself seemed to marvel at his good judgment at recruiting Rosetta: “Except for one fleeting appearance at the Cotton Club,” he wrote, “she had never sung anywhere except in Negro churches. She was a surprise smash; knocked the people out. Her singing showed an affinity between gospel and jazz that all fans could recognize and appreciate.”¹⁸

The cliché about overnight celebrity does not feel far-fetched in describing Rosetta’s experience in late 1938. It’s difficult to know how she experienced stardom, however, partly because she wasn’t forthcoming about her feelings. Publicly, of course, Rosetta smiled and beamed, learning early on to tell reporters what she thought they wanted her to say. However, there’s no reason to doubt Rosetta’s happiness at her success. Like a lot of people who take to the spotlight, Rosetta loved to be loved. Her trick at Carnegie Hall—ceasing to play when the audience least expected it, just to get a laugh—illustrated that desire to a T.

On the other hand, just as the “serious” Kriegsmann photograph captured a lesser-known side of Rosetta, so a part of her worried about what she had gotten herself into when she signed with Herman Stark. Occasionally she would confess her misgivings to Roxie Moore. Zeola Cohen Jones remembers her returning to Miami at some point—it may have been later in the 1940s—conceding regret. “ ‘One of the worst things I did was to leave the church. Because I thought people in the church were kind and loving.’ Now she said that to me,” Jones says.

Rosetta had reasons to feel uncomfortable. Notwithstanding its whiff of racial romanticism, From Spirituals to Swing had given her a dignified setting, at least in comparison to the stages of New York theaters in 1939 and 1940, as her career continued to expand. Years later, her obituaries would tout Rosetta as the first gospel act ever to headline the Apollo, and yet few probably cared to remember the circumstances of her original appearances there. Before a predominantly black audience, Rosetta appeared in a burlesque of Pentecostal religion, making her a party to the mockery of her church. At From Spirituals to Swing, Rosetta had appeared on a chaste stage wearing a modest dress that buttoned up to the neck; at the Apollo the following summer, she made a stage entrance in the midst of a “holy-roller meeting” as Variety put it, complete with “gals dressed in bright-colored old-fashioned dresses,” a male quartet “dressed in reds and greens,” and house comics doing “preacher stuff from a rickety rostrum and with a telephone book for a bible.” It is safe to say there were no practicing Pentecostals in the room. Perhaps because Herman Stark had set contractual limits on what she was allowed to perform outside the Cotton Club, Rosetta did insipid secular fare rather than the versions of “Rock Me” and “That’s All” that had earned her raves on Broadway. “Out of [the spiritual] idiom,” Variety concluded, in language so boorish it stands out even by pre–World War II standards, “she’s nothing more than another shoutin’ colored gal with a guitar.”¹⁹

The situation was no better at the Cotton Club; indeed, the Apollo’s white owners probably derived their idea of what would please black audiences by copying what was popular with the white crowd on Broadway. (Black audiences, meanwhile, might have clamored for access to the type of entertainment they were denied on account of race.) In one Cotton Club revue that ran through the summer of 1939, Rosetta performed in a similar “Pentecostal Meeting” set, backed by dancers and singers playing the roles of worshipers, evidently to encourage the audience to “jitterbug” to her “revival songs.” In fact, she was playing at actual Pentecostal churches in New York on Sunday mornings, while “playing church” on stage in an irreverent fashion during the rest of the week. The contrast drew the attention of the editors at Life magazine, who arranged for a one-page piece devoted to the singer who “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.”²⁰

The Cotton Club Parade of spring 1940—in which Rosetta shared a billing with the Andy Kirk Orchestra, featuring Mary Lou Williams on piano and Floyd Smith on “the electrified string instrument”—went a step further. At one point in that show, Rosetta entered the stage riding a mule with a phone book strapped to it. The wisecracking comedian Alan Drew played the role of a jive-talking preacher. As Variety put it, he “aids the sister in conducting her meetin’.”²¹

Given the multiple ways she had violated her church’s teachings, it seems curious that in September 1939 Tommy Tharpe showed up to chastise Rosetta—for forgetting to wear her hat during one performance.²² Where had Tommy Tharpe been this whole time, and why did he publicly admonish his wife for this seemingly minor infraction? Perhaps he thought it best to assert his authority on doctrinal matters so as to undermine Rosetta’s authenticity, the quality she was selling on nightclub stages. Zeola Cohen Jones recalls that Tommy stayed behind in Florida when Rosetta first went north, but by late 1939 he apparently felt the need to distinguish himself from her by trading on his power as a man and a minister. By publicly reproaching Rosetta, Tommy created the necessary distance from her to continue with his own work as a COGIC minister in Brooklyn.

Even without her husband’s reprimand, it’s not surprising that Rosetta could sing “I Looked Down the Line (and I Wondered)” with such conviction in late 1939, or that she sometimes longed publicly for a return to the days before her theatrical stardom. “You know,” she told reporters just before Tommy Tharpe’s public censure, “there was something about the work as soloist in the church that I cannot seem to find as a star on Broadway. Guess I just learned to love the folk I was associated with and miss them more now that I don’t see them anymore.”²³

While Rosetta was contemplating the consequences of her choices, debates raged in various sectors of the black press about the morality of swinging the spirituals. (Typically these took place among members of mainline denominations, excluding entirely the voices of black Pentecostals or adherents of other Holiness churches.) In Pittsburgh, George W. Harvey, pastor at New Hope Baptist Church and associate religion editor at the Pittsburgh Courier, gave a “stirring address” urging responsible black Christians to “stamp out the wanton practice of desecrating the songs of our fathers and mothers.” As an example of a primary offender he cited pianist-singer Fats Waller, whose uncle happened to be a deacon at New Hope Baptist, and who had performed “When the Saints Go Marching In” in “a fast swing time in places of business conducted by or for the race.”²⁴ The implication was clear: black entertainers who “swung” the spirituals were rendering the sacred music of their ancestors into music for social dancing, and everyone knew what social dancing signified. Dorsey himself entered the fray of public debate in a 1941 piece in the Chicago Defender, making essentially the same point. After noting that “some of our churches are so high-tone now that they are above singing spirituals”—a dig at those institutions that rejected his own compositions as unholy—he continued: “I have written more than three hundred gospel songs and spirituals. I do not object to them being used on the air, but they must not be desecrated or used for dance purposes.”²⁵

Others, especially black intellectuals, also chimed in. In “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” an essay from 1934, the anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, enfant terrible of the New Negro establishment, took a stance rooted in her own fieldwork among Sanctified churches in Florida. “The great masses [of black people] are still standing before their pagan alters and calling old gods by a new name,” she observed. “As evidence of this, note the drum-like rhythm of all Negro spirituals. All Negro-made church music is dance-possible.”²⁶ Unlike her fellow intellectuals, Hurston rejected the terms of the “swinging spirituals” debate as established by organs such as the Courier. Instead, she reframed the entire question according to her belief that the spirituals were a living music, not a fossilized legacy.

The writer Arna Bontemps, a leading light in Chicago and Harlem literary circles, took a similar tack. In “Rock, Church, Rock!,” a 1942 article from the left-leaning journal Common Ground, he sketched two dilemmas: a generational battle over the new rhythmic sounds emerging from Northern urban churches, and a brewing resentment among churchgoers over the dissemination of this music as secular entertainment. While Bontemps sympathized with those who liked their church songs “lively,” he also commiserated with those who were aghast at what Rosetta was doing. Noting that “Georgia Tom”—Dorsey’s name when he was with Ma Rainey—lurks in songs like “Hide Me in Thy Bosom,” he concludes: “It is not surprising that the swing bands fell for this stuff, nor that a church singer like Sister Thorp [sic] could join Cab Calloway without changing her songs. Neither is it surprising that the church folks resented this use of their music and complained bitterly. They have their case, and it’s a good one.”²⁷

The same month Life pictured Rosetta as a performer who precariously bridged the sacred/secular divide in black popular culture, it sent photographer Charles Peterson out on assignment to do a feature spread that would never make it into the pages of the magazine. The idea was to illustrate a jazz jam session, and toward that end, Life had recruited the white jazz guitarist Eddie Condon and promoter Ernie Anderson to organize a by-invitation-only party at the Riverside Drive apartment of Burris Jenkins, a pioneering white political cartoonist. Along with record producer Harry Lim, the guest list included Calloway, Ellington, Rex Stewart, Max Kaminsky, Ivie Anderson, Hot Lips Page, Pee Wee Russell, Chu Berry, Johnny Hodges, Billie Holiday, Cozy Cole, Clyde Newcombe, Bud Freeman, and Dave Tough.

Before long, it seems, everyone at the party had lost all self-consciousness about the fact that they were being photographed for Life; there was too much pleasure to be had drinking and smoking and making music. Rosetta had brought along her guitar, and took turns with Ellington playing it. At one point, she looked on as he strummed and Calloway messed around on the keyboards, and one can only imagine what they were playing, since everyone in the photograph, including Ivie Anderson, is laughing. At another point, Rosetta, wearing one of the men’s striped suit-jackets, with a glass of beer beside her, sang and played guitar while Ellington sat at the piano. In the photograph, her eyes are closed in concentration as she plays, using a finger pick on her right thumb. Duke, his tie undone, and drenched in sweat, regards her with what looks like wonderment, while Calloway and trombonist J. C. Higginbotham lean in for a better listen. Trumpeter Hot Lips Page, meanwhile, gazes toward Ellington, with a smile that says, “Well, isn’t this something?”

Rosetta jams with Duke Ellington (at piano), Cab Calloway, and trombonist J. C. Higginbotham at a private party arranged by Life magazine, August 1939. Trumpeter Hot Lips Page looks over Duke’s shoulder. Photo by Charles Peterson. Courtesy of Don Peterson.

Rosetta stayed on the payroll of the Cotton Club until it closed in June 1940. By that point, she had not merely played in New York, but throughout the country and in Canada, as part of Calloway’s popular traveling show. In a little less than two years, she had not only endeared herself to a variety of New York audiences, but managed to meet, if not work with, most of the notable black entertainers of the day. (She even did a brief stint opposite Louis Armstrong in the Cotton Club’s waning days.) The intimacy of Peterson’s photograph hints at the high regard with which many secular musicians regarded Rosetta. Yet as a gospel entertainer, a Pentecostal, and a woman, she was never part of the inner sanctum of jazz in the 1930s or ’40s. Indeed, Rosetta’s turn at the Cotton Club, although relatively short-lived, set a tone for the rest of her career. The “swinger of spirituals” moniker would stick, outlasting the Swing Era itself.