She wasn’t a groveler, and she didn’t let us grovel.
She said, Hold your head up. Even if you had a headache
and you had to hold it down you had to hold it up.
Rosettes singer Lottie Henry Smith
In moving to central Virginia in the late 1940s, Rosetta bucked the usual pattern of twentieth-century African American migration. But leaving Harlem for Richmond made personal and professional sense. In Richmond, she was comfortable and content, familiar with the rhythms and rituals of daily life. At the same time, Richmond afforded Rosetta easy access to the places where she enjoyed the greatest popularity. Atlanta and Baltimore were a day’s drive. So was Decca’s new Nashville studio, as well as, for that matter, her hometown of Cotton Plant.
Just as it afforded her the ability to travel, so Richmond also represented stability. Before she bought the house on Barton Avenue, Rosetta had never really enjoyed a rest from a life of unceasing movement. “She grew up without a home, so home was important to her,” says Roxie Moore. The Barton Avenue house was the structure with which Rosetta repaired such childhood deprivation. Furnished according to the lavish standards of a girl who had grown up poor, but still not too grandiose, it wasn’t on the scale of Graceland, Elvis’s baroque monument to a poor white country boy’s ideal of home, but it served the same palliative function. It was where Rosetta did ordinary things: cooked meals, watched Ed Sullivan, or listened to records by silky-voiced Nat “King” Cole. When fellow musicians stopped by, she would settle in at her white baby grand piano or break out her guitar, play a few bars of something she had been working on, and solicit their feedback. “Does this work?” she would say. Or: “Listen to this.”
Because of Rosetta’s celebrity, 2306 Barton Avenue was something of a legend among neighbors. Modest-sized by the standards of today’s suburban McMansions, it had a foyer graced by white ionic columns and mirrored walls and ceilings. The basement had knotty-pine floors and walls. The outside featured a substantial lawn, a rose garden, and a three-car garage, which served for some period of time as a makeshift stable for Rosetta’s horse, Margaret.1 There was also a shedlike structure in the back, although no tool had ever seen its interior. Lined with cedar shelving and insulated to protect against heat or cold, it instead served as an extra-large closet where Rosetta and Marie stored their dresses, shoes, hats, and other accessories. When future Rosettes Sarah Brooks and Lottie Henry first laid eyes on the interior of 2306 Barton Avenue, they were awed by its luxury. “Her carpets were so thick your foot went down in it,” Sarah remembers, illustrating with her hand. “Televisions had just come out and she had cabinets with a television. Just a little one, but it was beautiful, it was amazing to us.” Robert Allen, who lived at 2401 Barton Avenue as a child, never saw the inside of 2306, yet he does remember seeing Rosetta outside in all her finery. “The women [Rosetta and Marie] used to wear fox fur things,” he says, grasping for the right description of the macabre fur stoles then in style—the sort with “clips in the fox’s mouth. . . . They were sharp. As a little kid I thought it was cool. It was almost like they were wearing costumes.”
As well as a refuge from show business, the Barton Avenue home was Rosetta’s stage for creating her self-image in the conservative 1950s. Amid postwar political retrenchment, especially concerning women and gender roles, the Richmond house proved an ideal place for her to massage her public image as a respectable female gospel singer and a domestic woman. A publicity photograph from the era, which turned up in the photo morgue of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, shows Rosetta standing in her yard next to a rosebush in full bloom, wearing a formal, satiny gown with a high collar and ruffled cuffs, her hair piled in loose, feminine curls on top of her head. Her gaze is modest rather than direct, her eyes cast downward at a small piece of paper that she holds in her left hand. The image has a nostalgic air; take away the chain-link fence, and you would think it belonged to an earlier era. A caption imprinted at the bottom of the photograph reads, “At Home in Her Garden, Richmond, Virginia.”
Unlike the vast majority of images of Rosetta produced during her career, this one is introspective and serious in a way that resembles contemporary images of a pious, contemplative Mahalia Jackson, who was often pictured wearing a robe, her eyes closed and her face a knot of prayerful contemplation. Most striking of all, it departs from virtually every other publicity photograph of Rosetta in showing her reading rather than performing. Instead of being accessible, she is lost in a realm of private thoughts that viewers can’t share, just as we can’t know exactly what is written on the piece of paper she holds. The outdoor setting of the photograph underscores the naturalness of this captured moment, especially in contrast to the more obviously staged, artificially lit images of Rosetta from earlier days. The natural Rosetta, the photograph says, is a woman of feminine grace and intellectual refinement, not “primitive” spiritual enthusiasm.
The picture of Rosetta engaged in a leisurely, intellectual pursuit was significant in other ways. At a time when most black women still worked as maids, it illustrated a dream imagined by a burgeoning civil rights movement. Like Billie Holiday, who as a child scrubbed the stoops of homes in Baltimore, Rosetta had only her gift to fall back upon as a way out of a life taking care of other people’s things or children. The phrase “in Her Garden” on the photograph conveyed powerfully the importance of freedom from such domestic labor.
Because Richmond had a substantial black middle class and was a key Southern transportation hub, black residents of the city in the 1930s and ’40s took to calling their hometown the Harlem of the South. On a mild Saturday night in 1943, leisure-seeking rail workers, domestics, teachers, cooks, and tobacco factory laborers would have gone out to the Booker-T theater to see Stormy Weather, the movie musical starring Rosetta’s Broadway friends Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, and Richmond native son Bill Robinson. The next day, the same audience might have found musical edification of a different variety at one of Richmond’s many established Baptist and Methodist churches, or at an evening gospel program at a local auditorium. Although dwarfed by New York in population, Richmond had a richer gospel music culture than Harlem. Indeed, although unrivaled as a mecca of jazz and swing, New York had never quite fostered the distinct gospel scene or sound of much smaller cities.2 Virginia, however, had a grass-roots gospel tradition, especially of the groups known as “jubilee” quartets.
Jubilee quartets were vocal harmony groups, and in the 1930s and ’40s, as modern styles were developing, they sprang from churches, schools, neighborhoods, tobacco factories, veterans’ associations, and trade unions—in short, wherever there were voices to harmonize. People in Richmond were “gospel oriented” according to Reverend Franklin G. Pryor, associate minister at the city’s First Baptist Church, and jubilee singing satisfied a need for “clean” leisure. Even working-class families, he says, placed value on a musical education, especially for girls. “Most of your southern black homes had two things in it: a sewing machine—that was for the girls to sew and make clothes—and you also had a piano. All black young girls, it was almost mandatory that they take piano lessons at fifty cents a lesson.” Future Rosettes Sarah Brooks and Lottie Henry, musically inclined and admonished by their strict parents to stay out of trouble, discovered in harmonizing an enjoyable, adult- and church-sanctioned means of passing the time. “Back in those days we couldn’t do much going out,” says Lottie. “So we’d sit around on the front porch and, you know, amuse ourselves with [singing].”3
Rosetta herself had worked closely with Richmond quartets even before buying the Barton Avenue home. In 1947 and 1948, she released three Decca 78s with the Dependable Boys, a five-member group with a nimble, effervescent sound.4 Their recordings of “Everybody’s Gonna Have a Wonderful Time Up There,” “Down by the Riverside,” and “My Lord’s Gonna Move This Wicked Race” delightfully paired Rosetta’s expressive lead vocals and plucky guitar stylings with the quartet’s suave harmonizing. One of their recordings—“My Lord and I”—stood out as a striking reversal of the move Rosetta had made in her Decca debut a decade earlier, when she sang the song as “My Man and I.” Another, “Little Boy How Old Are You,” demonstrated Rosetta’s agility with the electric guitar, an instrument that she probably had been playing since the late 1930s. At the bridge, she unleashed a thrilling solo, reaching for the top of the instrument’s range and squeezing out unexpected notes. In such recordings, you can hear the palimpsest that is twentieth-century black popular sound: gospel merging with blues merging with something about to be rock and roll.
The Dependable Boys was a virtuoso group, but not a major name outside of the Southeastern orbit of jubilee singing. In contrast, the Harmonizing Four, the pillars of the Richmond scene, had a following that stretched from Pittsburgh to St. Petersburg and beyond. One of the longest-lived quartets in gospel history, the group debuted in 1927 at Richmond’s Dunbar Elementary School and recorded its first 78s on Decca in 1943.5 By the mid-1940s, Rosetta (and Marie) had begun touring regularly with the Harmonizing Four, whose members became good friends with Rosetta. Especially after she bought property in Richmond, she frequently visited the singers’ homes. Donald Liston Smith, son of quartet member Lonnie Smith, remembers Rosetta stopping by one day when he was five or six with a gift of a miniature white guitar that she had seen in a store window and spontaneously bought for him, perhaps because it brought to mind pleasant memories of her own childhood. Yet the little white guitar, although unforgettable, failed to make a lasting impression. Like his brother, Lonnie Liston Smith Jr., Donald grew up to become a jazz pianist instead.
In 1949, around the same time that she presented Donald Smith with his own guitar, Rosetta was preparing to celebrate her first Richmond “anniversary” concert, marking one year of official residence in the city. Flyers advertising the event, which was to include several guest performers, were printed up and distributed around town—at the two black high schools, Armstrong and Maggie Walker; at various churches, and at Globe and Archer’s record shops. Those who were so inclined could purchase tickets directly from Lonnie Smith. The venue was the Mosque, a popular auditorium that featured several balconies, a basement-level ballroom that could be rented out for dances, an impressive gold-leaf-covered dome, imported mosaic tiles, elegant chandeliers, and a massive pipe organ. Its name came from its architectural inspiration in the mosques of India and the Middle East.
Such grand surroundings called for grand performances, which is partly why no one in Richmond that season looked forward to the anniversary with quite as much nervous anticipation as the Twilights, a local quartet scheduled to appear on the program. Formerly known as the Bluebirds and then as the Twilight Female Gospel Singers, the Twilights consisted of four young women: Lottie Henry (lead), Sarah Brooks (tenor), and Lottie’s first cousins Oreen and Barbara Johnson (alto and contralto). Later, a friend, Erma Wallace (bass), would join, bringing the group to five. At sixteen, Barbara was the baby, followed by Lottie and Sarah, both nineteen and graduates of Armstrong; Oreen and Erma, in their early twenties, were the “older” ones. At the time, all but Erma were unmarried.
The Twilights began their front-porch harmonizing on Twenty-eighth Street in Richmond’s Church Hill neighborhood. Their musical world was diverse, filled with spirituals and hymns in church, jubilee singing at gospel programs, and hillbilly and popular music—from Bing Crosby to Dinah Washington—on the radio. Inspired by the Ward Singers of Philadelphia, by the late 1940s, the Twilights had developed a “good radius,” according to tenor Sarah Brooks, a tall woman with a round, handsome face. They had stayed busy doing programs in most of the Virginia counties and cities as far north as Baltimore, and had also amassed significant broadcast experience, especially on Richmond radio stations WANT and WLEE.6
Until that night at the Mosque, however, the Twilights hadn’t sung on a program with anyone as famous as Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The thought of appearing before her gave Lottie, diminutive and fine-boned, the jitters. “That big star?” she thought, “We can’t get up in front of her!” But her father, who managed both the Twilights and the Dependable Boys, was unrelenting. In the end, Lottie and the other girls complied. They trembled inwardly, but they sang with steady self-assurance. And that, Lottie says, is when Rosetta “fell in love with us.”
Ever since it had looked like her partnership with Marie would end, Rosetta had been scouring the gospel landscape for singers to be part of her regular traveling act. Now, it seemed, she had found them, and in circumstances not all that different from the ones in which she had “discovered” Marie. Once again, too, she had the task of convincing wary parents to entrust their daughters to her. Lewis Warren Henry, Lottie’s father, knew the terrain of the professional gospel world, and he made his expectations exceedingly clear. “I want you to bring each one of them back here like you take her away. I don’t want nothing to happen to any of them,” he instructed Rosetta. Only after she had given him her solemn promise could the Twilights go into rehearsals with her on Barton Avenue.
Next to Rosetta—who was undiminished in vitality, and yet approaching midlife—the Twilights were young and new. Their sound was fresh, too. Whereas Rosetta’s background in the Sanctified Church had bequeathed to her an earthier, more dynamic approach to melody and rhythm, the “girls,” the products of strict Baptist upbringings, sang with a precision and purity that resembled the refined, sweet sounds of the Roberta Martin Singers (although they could get happy, too). When they harmonized, every individual tone was audible, and yet their voices blended together with a shimmering seamlessness. Theirs was the sound of the heaven pictured in Victorian engravings, complete with white-robed angels, golden harps, and God on His celestial throne.
Rosetta dubbed the group the Angelic Queens Choir and quickly set about rehearsing them to sing with her. Rosetta “had a voice that she could carry up,” remembers Lottie. “Her range was beautiful. She could sing high or low. She had come out of the Sanctified Church. And you know they belt their songs. Our [sound] was more . . . melodious.” They rehearsed constantly—sometimes for two or three hours at a time, sometimes for two or three days on end—to ensure that every part in the Angelics’ harmonizing was audible. As a background group, they worked hard to figure out how to complement Rosetta without overpowering her.
Rosetta and the Angelics began touring together in June 1949, just as the verdant Richmond summer was settling in. Their first stop was Macon, Georgia—not that far away, and yet well beyond the perimeter of their previous experience in what Lottie calls the “close-in” states. The “Deep South” was to them a forbidding place. “We were scared to death to go to Georgia because we had heard so many terrible things about it,” says Sarah. Rosetta, however, made sure they traveled comfortably and in style. In Macon, they stayed at a place called the Crystal White, which seemed so luxurious to the teenagers that they regretted leaving.
Hitting the road with Rosetta was a little like being called up from the Richmond jubilee farm team to sing for the gospel major leagues. In short order, the Angelics had not only whipped themselves into singing shape, but bought matching suits and heels, practiced their moves, and rehearsed their theme song, “Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior.” Rosetta was meticulous down to the finest detail. She insisted that their outfits, like their voices, blend with hers, and she was as exacting as a ballet mistress when it came to their routines. “She’d set aside an hour just for one hand movement,” recalls Sarah. As “her girls,” moreover, the Angelics (and, later, the Rosettes) always had to be dressed just so, and not repeat outfits too often.
Rosetta paid each of her singers in cash—fifteen dollars per day, or as much as thirty dollars each on a Saturday or a Sunday, when they did two programs. She also lived up to the promises she had made to Lewis Henry, fussing like a protective mother hen over her baby chickens. When one of the Angelics required medical care, she took her to a doctor. When the group had to shop for something as mundane as a new pair of stockings, Rosetta ensured an appropriate chaperone. In their presence, Rosetta never drank or cursed. “The whole time we were with her she conducted herself as a lady,” Lottie recalls. “She didn’t have men running around the hotel. And when we finished our program, we were hustled back to the hotel.” Her motto was “Keep a smile on your face and your big mouth shut”—pragmatic advice for well-dressed black girls traveling through unfamiliar Southern territory. Sarah admired Rosetta’s passionate commitment to her fans. “In gospel music if you can’t reach the people they just sit there,” she says. “But her audiences were usually very animated and they enjoyed her singing. And then she would stop singing and just pick that guitar, and sometimes they’d go crazy!”
Mother Bell attempted to exercise her own discipline, but to less effect. “Yes, Lord! She was very old-fashioned,” declares Sarah, in the manner of someone recalling spankings that never stung. “We did a lot of one-night stands. A lot of times we had to go in the [segregated] bathroom that we weren’t supposed to go in and wash off. And Ma Bell would have a fit. She’d say [doing an imitation of Katie Bell’s voice and diction] . . . ‘See those girls in there putting water all over theyself!’ ”
“Mama’s like all moms,” remembers Clyde Wright, then a young singer with the New York–based Selah Jubilee Singers, who toured periodically with Rosetta and the Rosettes. “She was watching us, the young people on the bus. We were the young guys, the girls they were so nice, and traveling after the concerts, usually, you know, sometimes we had to travel at night, and at that particular time . . . you know, we would try to smooch with the girls, but no way. She would [say], ‘Boys, get back in your place!’ ” And they would respond: “Yes, Mama, we going back.”
The young people could laugh secretly about Mother Bell’s strictness, but no one could deny her power as a singer of the old-time variety. Whenever she opened her mouth to sing “Ninety-nine and a Half Won’t Do,” her trademark number, she had church, Sarah and Lottie recall. The popularity of her performances of “Ninety-nine and a Half” on the road was buoyed by the success of a mother-daughter duet of the song released by Decca that same year, with the backing of the Sam Price trio (Price, bassist Billy Taylor Sr., and drummer Herbert Cowans). Katie Bell didn’t possess Rosetta’s range or tonal clarity, but she had a flat, moaning delivery that imbued her singing with spiritual authenticity, even on shellac. The 78 clocked in at under three minutes, but in concert Ma Bell drew the song out as long as she could, especially in its emotionally propulsive section of counting up from one to ninety-nine and a half, until she was satisfied that she had squeezed from it every last drop of holiness feeling.
Rosetta had chosen an innocent-sounding name for her group, but her motivations may not have been so pure. The moniker, or at least one close enough to it, had already been claimed by a Philadelphia group, the Angelic Gospel Singers, who had a hit at the time with the song “Touch Me Lord Jesus.” When the incumbent Angelics found out Rosetta had appropriated their name to draw publicity to her new group—in effect, tricking crowds into thinking they were seeing the Angelics of “Touch Me Lord Jesus” fame—they demanded she put an end to it. “She felt as though [using the name] would help to draw a crowd for her,” remembers Angelics lead singer Margaret Allison, who later became a friend. “She apologized for it later. I accepted her apology.” Hence it came to pass that seven years before Ray Charles named the female vocal group formerly known as the Cookies the “Raelettes,” Rosetta dubbed her angelic backup singers the “Rosettes,” after herself.
The name change was finalized just in time for the group’s triumphant return to Richmond with Rosetta in late 1949 for another concert at the Mosque. Billed as Rosetta’s “homecoming,” the program featured local supporting musicians, with one unusual exception: a group billed as “The Jordonairs of Nashville, Tenn.—Nationally Known White Quartet.”7 Later, the Jordanaires (with an “e”) would sing backup for Elvis Presley, providing the famous “oohs” and “ahhs” on hits like “Hound Dog” and “All Shook Up.” At the time they toured with Rosetta, however, they were a white group partial to African American gospel and spirituals, and they had found modest success on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. Gordon Stoker, who joined the Jordanaires as pianist in 1949 and became lead tenor in 1950, says his group admired Virginia jubilee quartets like the Golden Gates and the Harmonizing Four, as well as soloists like Rosetta. “We dug black artists singing spirituals,” Stoker recalls, “and . . . what attracted us to her was the way she sang spirituals.”
Although Rosetta’s first concerts with the Jordanaires predated Stoker’s membership in the group, he speculates that “we were the first white quartet” to tour with an African American gospel musician, or at very least one of Rosetta’s prominence. Like the Rosettes, the Jordanaires admired Rosetta’s work ethic and her business savvy. Stoker recalls supporting her on tours of Arkansas and Tennessee, where they played three or four shows a week in filled-to-the-brim high-school auditoriums “because that’s all there was in those days.” Rosetta, he says, would work the crowd to a frenzy by doing one song “over and over and over,” stretching it out so fans would get maximum spiritual value for their money. As with the Rosettes, with the white Jordanaires Rosetta presented herself as a model of propriety and respectability—not an easy feat considering their schedule and the circumstances of their travel. Stoker remembers hearing that Rosetta “didn’t draw a line” when it came to alcohol or swearing, and yet, “I never heard her say a dirty word and I never ever heard a curse or anything like that . . . around us, she was always beautiful.”
Rosetta’s 1949 concert was a “homecoming” because, together with the Rosettes and arranger-pianist James Roots Jr., she had been on the road for five straight months. Thanks to her New York–based booking agent, David Taps, many more months of travel, especially through the West and Midwest, lay ahead. Sarah and Lottie, who traveled with Rosetta in each of the forty-eight states except for Washington and Maine, remember feeling as though they barely had time to change their clothes and say a quick hello to their parents before heading out again.
For their second tour, Rosetta had bought a bus, a refurbished number from Groome’s, a local tour company. James Boyer, the gospel singer and scholar who saw it when Rosetta made her annual visits to Florida in the early 1950s, remembers that it had “ROSETTA THARPE—DECCA RECORDING ARTIST” emblazoned across its length in an impressive script. The bus was impressive inside as well. In the back, the seats had been ripped out, making room for a dressing area with mirrors and closets, one for each of the Rosettes. Toward the front it had seats for riding and sleeping. Their road manager and Jimmy Roots occasionally did the driving, but mostly the bus was handled by a white driver whose name has slipped into oblivion.
Their first stop on this second go-round was the Jordanaires’ home base of Nashville, where Gordon Stoker got his first glimpse of the bus. It struck him as highly desirable; for one thing, he thought he had seen some bottles of alcohol on it. He didn’t then consider that the bus, which did triple duty as sleeping, eating, and changing quarters, might have been more of a necessity than a luxury for Rosetta and her touring ensemble. In retrospect he sees this as almost comically naïve. Why the Jordanaires never traveled with Rosetta, and why Rosetta might have required her own bus in the first place “didn’t even enter into our minds,” he says. “We didn’t even think about us staying in one hotel and her staying in another. Isn’t that funny? . . . I know we would go into the restaurant sometime and get a bag of food and bring it out. But even then I didn’t think about the fact that she couldn’t go in that restaurant and eat with us.”
In fact, Rosetta had her driver for emergency food runs when restaurants serving “coloreds” weren’t available. A white chauffeur of black musicians at a time when blacks typically chauffeured for whites, he was a secret weapon in Rosetta’s anti–Jim Crow arsenal. When Rosetta or one of the Rosettes had a craving that needed instant gratification, and when the only places for miles were Jim Crow establishments, their driver bought and delivered their food. Sometimes light-skinned Jimmy Roots could get service if he acted the part of a white man. Occasionally, Barbara or Oreen “passed” with a head scarf and a foreign accent.
Compared to the bus Rosa Parks would board in December 1955 on her way to becoming the public face of the civil rights struggle in Montgomery, Rosetta’s tour bus may seem a historical footnote. But as a symbol of black female independence, it was perhaps no less important or inspirational. At the time when few hotels in the entire country welcomed blacks, having a bus meant having a place to sleep no matter where you were. It meant not having to eat at the restaurants at the back of Greyhound Bus stations. Those who saw it—from Gordon Stoker and James Boyer to Rosetta’s neighbors on Barton Avenue in Richmond—have never forgotten it.
Soon after partnering with Rosetta, the Rosettes had a string of Decca recordings to their name. Some they did as the Rosette Gospel Singers, without Rosetta. On others, they sang backing vocals on “Sister Rosetta Tharpe” releases. One of these—“Silent Night” and “White Christmas,” released on flip sides of a single 45 rpm—became a surprise hit. Billboard gave high marks to the single, released just in time for the 1949 holiday season and the beginning of a new decade: “Miss Tharpe’s evangelical fervor and the choir backing make a sock Christmas side for the rhythm and blues outlets.”8 Some more conservative radio stations, on the other hand, found Rosetta’s singing about the Baby Jesus with a bluesy lilt in her voice a bit too racy, and banned her record from the air. “She just couldn’t keep it in,” laughs Rosetta’s friend Georgia Louis, referring to Rosetta’s failed attempts to “discipline” her voice.
Notwithstanding what was probably a mismatch between singer and material, however, the record went over big with buyers. Bing Crosby had rendered the standard version of “White Christmas” for Decca in 1942, breaking every previous sales record in the history of the industry and making him the first white performer to chart on Billboard’s Harlem Hit Parade.9 Since then, it had become a Christmas tradition to cover “White Christmas,” and every year new versions had their five minutes of fame. In early 1950, record buyers sent Rosetta’s record—which had two Christmas classics on it—to number six on the recently dubbed “R&B Hit Singles” chart.
The record also paved the way for Rosetta’s first national television appearance, a coveted spot on the January 1, 1950, Perry Como Supper Club show.10 The opportunity to perform on TV thrilled everyone, not least Rosetta. Yet when she, Jimmy Roots, and the Rosettes arrived at the CBS studio in New York for rehearsals, they found that the show’s producers, for reasons unknown, had envisioned the stage set for “White Christmas” as a country hayride, complete with horse-drawn wagon. This was puzzling, but not outside the realm of the imagination, so they let it slide. Then they discovered that as part of the country theme, the Rosettes’ heads were to be covered in bandanas.
That was when Rosetta put her foot down, recalls Sarah, who had put off college to join the Rosettes. The bandanas suggested gratuitous stereotypes of the type Rosetta herself had confronted, and according to both Sarah and Lottie, they triggered a rage they didn’t often see. Perhaps Rosetta was thinking of her own “Four or Five Times” soundie with Lucky Millinder, in which she had hammed it up in gingham and painted-on freckles. In any case, Rosetta threatened a walkout if the Rosettes were made to wear the bandanas. She “would not let people demean us in any way,” Sarah recalls. “She said, Over my head.”
In the end, the show’s producers gave in to Rosetta’s stipulations, and the Rosettes made their first and only TV appearance “riding” in a hay-filled wagon that didn’t obscure their cute hairstyles and smart new red, white, and black plaid jumpers with matching white blouses. With the television cameras rolling, they, Rosetta, and Jimmy Roots performed “White Christmas” for an all-white studio audience. Back in Virginia, Sarah’s and Lottie’s families, full to bursting with pride and excitement, couldn’t witness it firsthand; none of them yet had a television. Downstate in Newport News, however, a lucky cousin got to watch the flickering, black-and-white images of the Richmond Rosettes perfectly coiffed, singing in perfect harmony.
Rosetta’s experience on Perry Como’s Supper Club show provides some indication of the constant struggles she continued to wage over how others—from television producers to music journalists to her own record label—categorized and represented her. Her argument with Como’s people was less over costuming per se than over the professionalism of her entire enterprise. Yet white television producers weren’t the only ones to typecast Rosetta. Through the late 1940s and early 1950s, the black press continued to describe her as a “former Broadway star,” defining her by work she had done a full decade earlier. The phrase had a powerful anchoring effect, securing Rosetta to a frozen place and time, even as she sought to move on as a musician and a person. It was particularly burdensome as she faced the ever-ascending star of Mahalia Jackson.
Five months after the success of “Silent Night”/”White Christmas,” Marie returned to work with Rosetta on an occasional basis. Had this taken place three years earlier, the reunion of the dynamic duo of gospel might have made headlines, but attention spans in the world of professional entertainment were notoriously short. Where gospel was concerned, moreover, Jackson’s was the name in the air that spring and summer of 1950. Black news outlets regarded her favorably for her refusal, especially after the million-selling “Move On Up a Little Higher,” to give in to offers to record blues. “Mahalia Jackson Rejects 10G Bid,” said a piece from the Richmond Afro-American. It was typical in its take on Mahalia, and yet noteworthy for the way it used Rosetta to define Jackson’s persona. Rosetta, it reported, had unleashed an “ ‘R’ bomb” in “theatrical circles” by performing a program of “Spirituals with a Modern Touch” at an unnamed Harlem location. In fact, Rosetta had been singing at the Apollo Theater, whose managers were trying every trick in the book to get Mahalia to do a joint concert there with her. Mahalia, however, refused. “I have informed the manager of the theatre and the public in general that I do not appear in performances in theatrical places or on any kind of program wherever theatrical artists appear,” she told the Afro-American. “I am a religious singer and very true to my religious belief.”11
Once again, Rosetta’s indifference to the distinction between “sacred” and “secular” had given offense. “That’s the thing, she was the kind that didn’t limit herself to the doctrine that came with the music,” says Ira Tucker Jr. “She allowed herself to be involved in other things, and she’d listen to anything. She wasn’t like her mom, she wasn’t tuned in and locked on to just one thing.” As someone who wanted to have it both ways, Rosetta represented a crack in the dam many black people had erected to preserve the church as a space apart: away from white eyes as well as free from commercial meddling. Dinah Washington (the former gospel singer Ruth Jones) could sing in clubs about being “A Slick Chick (On the Mellow Side),” and Mahalia could proclaim her principled refusal to sing at the Apollo in church halls across the nation, but Rosetta was a threat because she dared to bring Mahalia’s repertoire into Dinah’s territory.
Neither Jimmy Roots nor the Rosettes ever questioned Rosetta’s authenticity or sincerity as a gospel singer. They cherished their two Apollo appearances with her, keeping the club’s trademark collage-style photo souvenirs in scrapbooks they carefully preserved upon their return to Richmond. Lottie and Sarah remain staunchly protective of their mentor and big sister. “She was a gospel singer,” says Lottie. “I would defend her anywhere.”
Rosetta and Mahalia were on better terms than newspaper reports suggested. As photographer Lloyd Yearwood puts it, they were “good bosom friends,” linked as successful black women gospel singers, even if distinguished by different styles. Yet comparisons of the two, as well as gossip about their rivalry, proliferated until Rosetta’s death. A rumor would later circulate that Mahalia had refused to attend Rosetta’s funeral, although Jackson predeceased her by the better part of two years. Others would say Mahalia was jealous of Rosetta, or vice versa. Still others would resent the way the industry had thrown its weight behind Mahalia, not Rosetta. As Rosetta stepped into the second half of the twentieth century, however, one thing was clear: she needed some good publicity for a change, something that would lift up her career. Little did she know it, but a couple of unlikely gospel promoters just north in Washington, D.C., had the very thing.