Gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe is a big girl with a big voice who believes in doing things in a big way. Ebony magazine, October 1951
Irvin and Israel (“Izzy”) Feld, the Maryland-born sons of Jewish immigrant parents, were the reigning kings of gospel music promotion in the region extending from Baltimore to Norfolk when Rosetta met them around 1949. Allen Bloom, who worked for the Felds, remembers Rosetta walking into Super Cut Rate, their drugstore-turned-record-store in Washington’s Seventh Street shopping corridor, to propose a business deal with his bosses. Tim Stinson, who worked for Irvin Feld in later years, heard just the opposite—that the Felds sought out Rosetta’s business because her music sold so well among their customers.1 Either way, it was a match made in heaven: Rosetta, the singer-guitarist who was always and forever looking to reinvent herself, and the brothers with good ears and marketing instincts to match, who had created a miniature music empire before Irvin Feld’s thirtieth birthday.
Initially, the Felds promoted Rosetta in places like Turner’s Arena, a ratty two-thousand-seat auditorium at Fourteenth and V Streets, NW, then primarily known for hosting boxing and wrestling matches. But in 1950, Irvin and Israel, in concert with Rosetta, ratcheted up their ambition several notches. Especially when she toured with Marie, Rosetta was no stranger to huge shows with impressive profit margins. Once, the two women had played to a crowd of seventeen thousand at Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon park for a gross of $7,800, then played the same venue ten days later, for an additional $4,200 take.2 Surely if it could be done in Atlanta, it could be done in the District of Columbia, with its substantial population of Southern migrants?
With that challenge in mind, the Felds set their sights on promoting Rosetta at Griffith Stadium, the ballpark then home to the American League Washington Senators and the Negro League Homestead Grays. A little more than half a mile east of Turner’s, the stadium stood in the heart of Shaw, black Washington’s most historically significant and vibrant neighborhood. Geographically and socially, Shaw occupied a crossroads. Just up the hill to the north was Howard University, the nation’s preeminent historically black institution of higher education. Directly to the south stood the Gospel Spreading Church of God, home base of Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux, a charismatic preacher whose CBS radio shows and socially conscious ministry had made him a national celebrity during the Depression. South of the church was a large residential area, home to blue-collar workers as well as large numbers of the relatively privileged, including Duke Ellington, who once had a job selling peanuts at Griffith Stadium. The area was a literal crossroads, too. Just in front of the stadium, the streetcars that ran up and down Seventh Street changed power from overhead trolley line to underground third rail.
Although Clark Griffith, owner of the stadium, was infamous among African Americans in the region for his resistance to integrating Major League baseball, Griffith Stadium “was sort of like outdoor theater for the black community,” resident historian Henry Whitehead recalled. In segregated Washington, where black people could see the white-domed Capitol reflected back at them in the windows of establishments they were forbidden to enter, it was considered an important civic space. “Griffith Stadium was, putting it uncharitably, a dump,” sportswriter Dick Heller noted in a 2001 remembrance. “But it was our dump.”3
In setting their sights on Griffith Stadium for a gospel concert, the Felds unashamedly replicated precedents established by Elder Michaux. Like Rosetta, Michaux was famous for mixing piety with pageantry, often to the detriment of his reputation for religious sincerity. No one could deny his popularity, however. In 1938, he began renting out the ballpark for what he called “spectaculars,” outdoor events that featured singing, mass baptisms, and plenty of the Elder’s unconventional preaching. Michaux occasionally drew crowds numbering twenty thousand, mostly African American, although through the years his audiences included white notables such as First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. On one day in 1949, more people came out for Elder Michaux’s annual spectacular than for the Nationals/Tigers doubleheader, which had been played at the stadium earlier in the day.4
In planning their 1950 concert for Rosetta, the Felds took their cue from such colorful, theatrical, and resoundingly profitable affairs. Like Michaux, who used fireworks and other devices to dramatize Bible scenes, they hired a fireworks company to produce a state-of-the-art display. To ensure a varied, top-notch lineup, the Felds hired the Golden Gate Quartet and Elder Smallwood E. Williams, activist pastor of Bible Way Church, who had won a 1948 Afro-American newspaper contest for “most popular preacher in the District” by a whopping margin of thirty-three thousand votes.5 Since Marie and Rosetta had recently returned to the studio together to record “When I Take My Vacation in Heaven,” backed with “You Gotta Move”—a record racing up the chart of Top Spirituals—the Felds billed the show as a special reunion concert. “SISTER ROSETTA THARPE and Madam Marie Knight, Together Again for This Performance Only!” trumpeted radio advertisements and print headlines.
In fact, the Felds had plans for future shows that would bring the two stars together again, and they started preparing for the second as soon as the July 1950 show ended. The “reunion concert” featuring Marie and the Golden Gates did well, according to Israel’s wife, Shirley Feld, who played a key role in running the business. But it did not succeed on the order they had imagined. Allen Bloom recalls that the very night of the 1950 concert, “Irvin said, ‘Rosetta, next year we’ve got to do something bigger and better.’ ”
That was when Irvin Feld got to thinking. Unlike her mother, Rosetta wasn’t an evangelist, so she couldn’t conduct a revival in the stadium, à la Michaux and other celebrity preachers. Then it hit Feld: perhaps they could combine a musical concert with a wedding, with Rosetta playing the star of both events? What was more attention-getting than a bride in her wedding gown? Didn’t everyone love a wedding, particularly a celebrity wedding? And weren’t weddings inherently theatrical, social rituals? Irvin considered the possibilities of a wedding at which the bride could entertain her own guests. If Michaux could administer the sacrament of baptism in the ballpark, then could not Rosetta follow his lead in using a baseball stadium for the sacrament of marriage? A practical man, Feld put the proposition to Rosetta without a lot of beating around the bush. Recalls Shirley Feld, “My brother-in-law said, Rosetta, find a husband. We’ll promote the wedding.”
Rosetta needed little convincing to sign on to Feld’s idea. That very night, she signed a contact with Irvin and Izzy, promising to produce a groom in seven months, by the beginning of the new year.
By the following spring, Rosetta had found her future husband. He was Russell Morrison, a handsome man two years her junior. Born in Pittsburgh to seventeen-year-old Allene Owens Morrison, a migrant from South Carolina, Russell, like Rosetta, had grown up without a father’s steady presence. Unlike Rosetta, however, he didn’t have the benefit of a protective mother to soften the blows life would deal him. According to his widow, Annie Morrison (whom he married after Rosetta died), Russell suffered through a difficult childhood. His only sibling, a younger sister, died before her twelfth birthday, and Allene, battling her own demons, drank heavily. During the Depression, she found solace in being what people in those days called a “good-time woman,” Annie says, often leaving Russell to make do alone. As soon as he graduated from high school, Russell lit out for Harlem.
Russell wasn’t musical himself—he couldn’t sing or play an instrument—but he was drawn to the glamour of the jazz life. As a young man, he did what he could to make himself useful to musicians. He found money doing odd jobs, and eventually landed a position as valet with the Ink Spots in 1941.6 It’s likely that Rosetta met Russell while on the road.
A lot of people who knew Russell call him lazy, and perhaps he was, but from another perspective, it’s possible to see him as someone who refused to let his ambitions be boxed in by reality. If Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who also roamed the streets of Harlem in the thirties, was a “thinker-tinker,” “kin to Ford, Edison and Franklin,”7 then Russell was a dreamer-schemer, part of a less celebrated, but equally American, tradition. William Gittings, Russell’s younger cousin, recalls that when he came back to Pittsburgh to visit family in the late 1940s, Russell would talk about his life among New York’s musical stars. He would boast that “it was a toss-up [for marriage] between Rosetta and Mahalia.” At the time, no one paid him much mind. Imagine the surprise of everyone back in Pittsburgh, then, when they found out he might not have been 100 percent hot air after all.
Russell’s marriage must have fulfilled his most grandiose hopes. On the other hand, Russell had a way with women. “He was the slickest dude you ever wanted to meet,” recalls Ira Tucker Jr. “In the day, when [Rosetta] married him, he was bad. I mean he had the process, he had his hair processed all pretty. He was light-skinned, which meant a lot at that time. He was thin, and he dressed well.”
It wasn’t just his looks, however, that drew women to Russell. A cigar smoker (he would eventually die of emphysema), he also had a rakish quality that, combined with a natural reserve, gave him an air of quiet confidence and invulnerability. Especially once he and Rosetta married, he carried himself with the insouciance of someone to the manner born. Although he stood no more than five foot nine in his socks, Russell seemed a bigger man. “He was quiet, but you better not cross him,” is how Annie Morrison puts it.
It seems that few people shared Rosetta’s excitement about her husband-to-be. Marie, who had always been savvier than her partner, was not amused; she took one look at Russell in her coolly knowing fashion and figured, rightly, that he was after Rosetta’s money. Young as he was at the time, Allen Bloom shared Marie’s feelings. So did Irvin Feld, but he stayed out of it, figuring that, although he was throwing Rosetta the wedding, the groom was none of his business. Even Annie Morrison, who never knew Rosetta personally, concedes that Russell probably married Rosetta for economic security. Certainly, she says, her husband had no particular interest in gospel and was not a religious man. “Russell always liked working around the nightlife,” she said, but “he never talked about the church. I only got him to go to church a couple of times with me.”
Other people emphasize Rosetta’s interest in the marriage. Georgia Louis, Rosetta’s friend from the 1960s, speculates that Rosetta needed Russell as much as he needed her. “You want someone to go ahead and do things for you,” Rosetta had told her once, in a heart-to-heart. “You needed a forerunner because you needed help. And then you became dependent on that person” and fooled yourself into mistaking dependency for love. Roxie Moore similarly notes that a part of Rosetta had always placed a premium on male “protection.” Like a lot of resourceful women, Rosetta made her own way in the world, and yet she still conceived of herself as deeply fragile, incapable of self-support. “She had no stability of her own,” Moore observes. “She needed a backbone. She needed a strong man.” Shirley Feld lays the matter out in practical terms. Rosetta “was a showman, that’s why she wanted this wedding, too,” she says. “It wasn’t exactly a love affair, but it was a good way of having a husband and a wedding.”
Rosetta’s marriage to Russell throws into relief her own complexities and contradictions. “She couldn’t imagine anyone would hurt her, and every husband attempted to steal a little of the light in which she shined,” says photographer Lloyd Yearwood. Unlike Marie, who never wed again after her divorce from Alfred Knight, Rosetta attached importance to being someone’s wife, even as she pursued a career that made traditional domesticity impossible. The Christmas cards she and Russell sent to friends in the early 1960s, when they had resettled in Philadelphia, captured this ambivalence. On the outside, the card features a cheerful image of a Christmas wreath against the background of a bright red front door. Inside, the card reads: “Wishing You a Merry Christmas and a Very Happy New Year. Mr. and Mrs. Rosetta—Tharpe—Morrison.”
Rosetta at once believed in romantic love and treated the wedding as a performance, perhaps because two previous marriages had taught her as much. The idea of turning her wedding celebration into a huge party appealed to that side of Rosetta that loved entertaining others. Indeed, she recognized life itself as something of a performance, where the fun lay as much in breaking the rules as in adhering to them.
In the spring of 1951, a few months before her nuptials, Rosetta met her half-brothers and -sisters from her father, Willis Atkins. Willis’s offspring took great pride in the blood connection they shared with one of gospel’s First Ladies, although, until then, they had known Rosetta only through her music or family lore. For her part, Rosetta suddenly went from being an only child to being part of an extended brood of eleven.
Rosetta became friends with her half-sisters Emily and Elteaser, but took a particular liking to her young half-brother Donell. When she returned to Camden in 1954, on another swing through her home state, she asked the sixteen-year-old to accompany her on a summer concert tour up and down the East Coast. Traveling with Rosetta was especially exciting for Donell because of the chance it gave him to meet other stars on the gospel circuit. A singing contest between the Bells of Joy and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama made an impression on him that has lasted more than fifty years. “They had a great gettin’ together, and there was so many people there, and there was people trying to outsing each other, and that was a great time,” he recalls vividly. On a few occasions, he even got the chance to “bring Rosetta on,” or introduce her to the crowd.
Donell remembers a particular incident from that summer that demonstrated Rosetta’s playfulness. One day, he said, Rosetta challenged him to climb a flagpole in a park where they had stopped to rest, betting him that he couldn’t do it. He appraised the situation and advised Rosetta to withdraw her bet unless she wanted to lose her money, but she refused. Realizing they were playing a game, Donell climbed the pole. When he arrived back on solid ground, Rosetta promptly paid up, in the form of a crisp hundred-dollar bill.
Irvin Feld’s dare to Rosetta—Find a husband, and we’ll promote the wedding—was something like that challenge to Donell. Just as Donell knew that Rosetta used the flagpole dare as an excuse to give him money, so Rosetta knew that the Felds understood the wedding as a vehicle for publicity and profit—theirs and her own. As Shirley Feld had intuited, it was a good way to have a husband and a wedding. It was a means of playing a game for the pleasure of others. It was certainly a way of having fun, and of showing her audience a good time. It might even prove to be the publicity stunt she needed to keep pace with the rapidly changing gospel world.
Janis Joplin, the white blues singer who came to prominence for her whiskey voice and gutsy performances à la Bessie Smith and Etta James, is usually credited as being the first American woman “stadium rocker.” The phrase itself suggests the degree to which this grand setting became synonymous with rock and roll after the Beatles’ wildly successful 1965 appearance at Shea Stadium in New York. Yet the phenomenal success of Rosetta’s 1951 wedding concert at Griffith Stadium demonstrates how incomplete popular memory can be, especially when it comes to gospel, which has never enjoyed the broad popular appeal of other black musical forms, such as jazz or rhythm and blues. Rosetta wasn’t a rock performer by any conventional definition. Her music never specifically targeted a youth audience, and despite her excursions into secular music, she primarily conceived of herself as a religious performer.
Yet if there is any doubt that she deserves the title of “stadium rocker,” consider that on that July 3, 1951, a balmy summer evening, when trolleys and buses in Washington sat idle because of an ongoing mass transit strike, she outsold the hometown Washington Senators in a regular-season game.8 Estimates of the crowd who came out to witness her nuptials vary. Decca, which made a live recording of the wedding concert, put the official number at twenty-two thousand, although it speculated that thirty thousand and upwards would have come had traffic not been snarled. The Afro-American, which featured the story on its front page, put the number at fifteen thousand, whereas Ebony magazine guessed twenty thousand. Shirley Feld, who worked the box office that night, can’t say definitely how many people showed up, although she knows “we had some big sale.”9
No expense had been spared for the event. Whereas usually they publicized concerts through posted signs or radio, the Felds took out display advertisements in area newspapers, calling out to readers with carnival-shouter flamboyance:
WEDDING BELLS RING OUT FOR . . .
SISTER ROSETTA THARPE
WITNESS THE MOST ELABORATE WEDDING
EVER STAGED! EVERYBODY IS WELCOME!
PLUS WORLD’S GREATEST SPIRITUAL CONCERT!
That last line made the music seem a bit like an afterthought, although the Felds had booked an impressive lineup: Marie, her protégée Vivian Cooper, the Rosettes, the Harmonizing Four, Katie Bell Nubin, James Roots Jr., and the Prophetess Dolly Lewis, a “spiritual advisor” and relatively recent addition to Rosetta’s touring ensemble. Advance admission ran from ninety cents, for seats in the nosebleed section of the ballpark, to two dollars and fifty cents, for prime real estate in the first-base dugout. Not even Rosetta’s half-sister Emily, who came up from Camden for the event, got a free ticket.
Reverend Samuel Kelsey, a popular COGIC pastor and recording artist, had been tapped to perform the ceremonial honors. Rosetta knew him well, having made visits to Temple Church of God in Christ a regular habit whenever she was in town. The congregation there opened their hearts to her, just as they had to Reverend Kelsey, who had a vivacious, outgoing personality. “People, they enjoyed him, because usually a minister of that caliber is so starchy that you’re afraid to go up and say hi, that sort of thing,” recalls May Ethel Holmes, who joined Temple COGIC in 1944. Consistent with his liberal approach to the pulpit, Reverend Kelsey encouraged a liberal approach to music in his church. When Rosetta had time, she would do freewill services at Temple COGIC or even work with the choir. Everyone loved her guitar playing, recalls Mother Holmes. “She could, as we said, make the hair rise up on your head in our church, ’cause we are very emotional. And she had something to offer in her music. Her music wasn’t just words. They were words that meant something to us, as Christians. And that’s one thing that Bishop [Kelsey] was very fond of, that she never stopped doing that gospel.”
Temple COGIC was in the midst of celebrating its annual youth congress in early July, when Rosetta arrived in Washington for the wedding. She visited the congress, May Holmes remembers, but gave no indication that she was in town for her own marriage. That news leaked out through the Reverend Kelsey. “He told me, you know I’m gonna marry Rosetta tomorrow, so I was able to come in [attend],” May says. “I went with two or three other members of the church. We were dressed in what we call our Sunday best, so we didn’t have to go home and get dressed up for the wedding.” From high up in the stands, they had a clear view of the entire ballpark.
What Mother Holmes and other paying “guests” witnessed that evening, on the eve of the annual celebration of national independence, was a crowd-pleasing spectacle that merged church and state, secular and spiritual. In an amusing tweak on ceremonial conventions, the Felds had assigned all of the musicians supporting roles in the ritual of the wedding itself. Marie beamed in a colorful gown as Rosetta’s maid of honor, and the Rosettes (reduced to four, since Sarah Roots was home sick in Richmond) sparkled as her rainbow of bridesmaids, each Rosette in a gown of a different color. The perpetually dapper Lucky Millinder, whose career had come upon hard times in the early 1950s, put in a guest appearance as Russell’s best man. Theodore LeMar Summers—known to everyone as LeMar—a boy who lived with his mother and siblings in a small apartment above the Felds’ Super Cut Rate store, served as ring bearer. Together with Mother Bell and the others, they formed a procession that began at the third-base dugout and led to a stage at second base. Last out, and marching regally to the tune of the “Bridal Chorus” from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, was Rosetta.
Her entrance into the ballpark was greeted with gasps of admiring pleasure. From the upper deck, women leaned forward and squinted to get a look at her outfit. Rosetta had spent a small fortune on it—about $1,500, the average price of a new car in 1951, or roughly one-fifth of the cost of the house on Barton Avenue. In addition to $800 on the dress itself—a white lace nylon gown with a five-foot train, a scoop neck, and sheer lace sleeves that narrowed to a diamond shape and attached by a loop to the third finger of each hand—she had spent $350 on a magnificent sequin-trimmed veil that hung from a rhinestone- and pearl-encrusted tiara, and $400 on an extravagant bouquet of white orchids interspersed with white ostrich feathers.10 Matching white satin heels peeked out from under her hem.
Backstage, the dress made an impression, too, and not just for its lofty price tag. It had been driven up to D.C. earlier that day from Thalhimer’s, the Richmond department store where Rosetta had purchased it, in its own car. The Rosettes were used to Rosetta’s fine things, according to Lottie Henry, but in their opinion, this one detail proved that Rosetta had outdone herself. “Nobody rode with the gown but the person driving the car and the lady that was going to arrange it,” Lottie recalls. “But they sent their station wagon just for that gown with all this trail and stuff.”
What Shirley Feld recalls most vividly is the race of the woman sent up from Richmond to fit Rosetta: she was white. “Thalhimer’s was the leading department store, and [at the time] they didn’t even want to see a black person walk in,” Shirley recalls. “But because it was Rosetta Tharpe and she bought this expensive wedding gown, they sent the bridal consultant [to D.C.] with the gown to get her in it. And that wasn’t easy!” she laughs. “It had like a thousand little buttons down the back. And the white bridal consultant from Thalhimer’s had the job of getting her in it. . . . She was nice about it. But it was a big thing for a white to have to button a black into something.”
The unusual “courtesy” extended to Rosetta may well have been compensation for an earlier incident that had caused the store some embarrassment. In 1949, according to Lottie and Sarah, Rosetta decided to go on a shopping spree at the Thalhimer’s anchor store at Seventh and Broad Streets. “This was in the latter part of the segregated years,” Lottie recalls, “and she had gone and bought a mink coat. And by her buying all this stuff, spending all this money and stuff, they might have thought she was criminal or something. I don’t know what they thought.”
They speculate that the situation might have been prompted in part by Rosetta’s casual attire. Normally, Rosetta didn’t leave the house without paying careful attention to her appearance. (“Oh, that thing could dress! Yes, she could!” Lottie testifies.) But that day, she set out in a cropped, “inexpensive-looking” fur coat, jeans, and comfortable boots, a scarf covering her hair. In any case, Sarah continues, “They asked her how she’s going to pay. And she said she’s going to pay cash. And they made a call to the [police] and they came and took her downtown. And later when they found out who she was and that she could afford to pay cash, then they apologized and she got all that stuff for nothing.”
Over the years, word of the incident morphed into something of a legend. Drink Small, the blues singer and guitarist from South Carolina, was a friend of Rosetta’s in the 1950s. He saw her on a number of programs, including one with the Harmonizing Four and the Swan Silvertones, and another with the Five Blind Boys and the Soul Stirrers. In the version of the story he knows, Rosetta wasn’t just arrested; she charmed her way out of the clutch of the Richmond police. “I heard it said that she was in jail,” he says, “and that she played so good the jailor let her out.” Even if it has a “Robert Johnson at the crossroads” quality, the scene is tantalizingly imaginable: Rosetta, in street clothes rather than her usual glorious getups, surprising a dubious white police officer and using her guitar skills as a get-out-of-jail-free pass. It would have been a satisfying resolution to an unpleasant affair.
It took a full twenty minutes for the wedding procession, including Rosetta and her dress, to assemble at the altar, which had been decorated with a white wooden lattice draped with white gladiolas and American flags. Reading in a solemn voice from the District of Columbia marriage ceremony, Reverend Kelsey asked the crowd of twenty thousand whether anyone knew of any reason why the couple couldn’t be married: “Speak now,” he warned, as Shirley Feld and the others backstage cracked up. “Don’t talk tomorrow!”
By the time he got to the portion of the ceremony in which vows would be exchanged, Kelsey, known for making wisecracks at weddings, was fully in his element. He referred playfully to the possibility of divorce, and teased the groom about his authority over his bride. He delivered the admonishment to both parties to “forsake all others” with a winking tone, and drew an audible crescendo of giggles from the women in the stands as he instructed Rosetta to “obey,” “serve,” and “love” her husband. Allusions to Russell’s semiornamental role in the affair received the biggest reaction, however, and the crowd broke into outright laughter when Kelsey asked, mock-innocently, “Do you have a ring, Russell?”
The concert part of the evening followed immediately after the vows. The Sunset Harmonizers did “Gospel Train,” the Harmonizing Four “Thank You Jesus for My Journey.” Rosetta, still in her wedding dress, sang and played electric guitar. Accompanied by the Rosettes—no longer scared girls, but experts at performing before large crowds—she did “So High,” a familiar song at Reverend Kelsey’s church, as well as “God Don’t Like It,” her song about the sinfulness of alcohol, which mixes two parts Louis Jordan cheekiness with one part Wings Over Jordan holiness. She and Marie also performed several of their recently recorded songs, including “Revival Telephone,” which picks up on the longstanding Pentecostal metaphor of a “telephone to heaven.”
The wedding concert concluded with fireworks. In addition to the “lifelike reproduction” of Rosetta strumming on her guitar, guests were treated to “a huge display of Cupid’s hearts pierced with arrows,” as well as luminous simulations of Niagara Falls and a duck laying eggs. (These constituted a visual allegory of the couple’s progress, from falling in love, to celebrating their marriage, to having children). By the time the last of the sparklers in the stadium fizzled out, it was practically midnight.11
Like Elder Michaux’s “spectaculars,” the wedding concert thumbed its nose at middle-class conventions of piety and flaunted the marriage of religion and commerce. From Rosetta’s perspective, the event was an undisputed triumph, melding her overlapping entrepreneurial, spiritual, and artistic ambitions into one unforgettable evening. No single concert had ever put her in such high spirits. “I am happier than I’ve ever been in my life!” she gushed theatrically to the small band of reporters gathered outside her dressing-room door.12
It is fitting that the Griffith Stadium show is the best-remembered achievement of Rosetta’s career, the one that gets a specific reference in all of her obituaries. Rosetta made memorable recordings, but the essence of her gift and her art lay in her ability to communicate with an audience. “Rosetta was more than a guitarist, she was an instrumentalist blessed with wonderful technique and feeling,” says Swiss music promoter Willy Leiser, who befriended Rosetta in the 1960s. “Above all, she had an exceptional stage presence.”
The huge crowd that turned out for her wedding concert was the proof Rosetta needed—at a crucial time in her career and her life—that she could still rely on her gift. The event also allowed her to combine blushing-bride modesty with uninhibited musical authority. Because these roles implied such disparate expressions of female sexuality, Rosetta, like other women musicians, rarely got to inhabit them simultaneously, without disharmony. But the wedding concert momentarily created a space where the good and the bad woman, the domestic goddess and the guitar goddess, could coexist.
Rosetta’s wedding and concert embodied feelings of community and hope that took her audience of primarily black women outside of their everyday lives. In a testament to the closeness they felt to her, and out of respect for the occasion, these fans came to Griffith Stadium dressed for church. Some came with dates, others with children who were expected to sit still and behave. Many arrived bearing wedding presents for the bride and groom: silverware, household appliances, lamps, rugs, chairs, jewelry, and even television sets.13
Shirley Feld remembers that the wedding concert was the Felds’ biggest success to that date. “The sale was fantastic,” she says. “And [Rosetta] was excited about that, too. And then she was excited about the wedding. The bridal gown and the whole nine yards. It was a big event.” Allen Bloom, only sixteen, recalls taking home $7,500 in cash, more than he could fit in his pockets. Much of his earnings came from the sale of souvenirs: everything from program books and “Abe Lincoln” pennies (coins wrapped in tin foil) to novelty items like lucky key chains, “holy” handkerchiefs, and midget Bibles, which Allen had dutifully rubber-banded together with matching miniature magnifying glasses in the days leading up to the wedding.
The Bibles and holy handkerchiefs were trademarks of Dolly Lewis, the featured “prophetess” of the evening. A singer and evangelist born in Dublin, Georgia, in 1910, “Miss Dolly” was a physically striking woman who always appeared on stage wearing a robe, a symbol of her status as a “seer.” According to Abner Jay, who was her driver for nine years, and who briefly managed Rosetta and Marie, Dolly began her professional career in the early 1930s, leading prayer and healing sessions throughout the South.
Rosetta and Marie first met the Prophetess Dolly, also known as The Divine Healer, in the mid-1940s, at one of their Tampa shows. Dolly may have been a “gifted soul,” but she was also a shrewd one. Even Marie, who was closest to her, concedes that on more than one occasion Dolly’s holy handkerchiefs were blessed by “being hosed down behind stage just before a program.”14 On the other hand, Marie and Rosetta believed in Dolly’s talent to foretell. She “would dazzle audiences at revivals by calling people by their full names,” Marie remembers. She also provided more practical services. “People would pay what they had to consult with her. She got people out of prison and got pregnant girls out of trouble.”
Others were considerably more circumspect about the Prophetess’s powers. “She was a prophetess like I’m a prophetess,” Shirley laughs. “She was telling you the number to play. Oh, I remember those days—Prophetess Dolly Lewis, it was hysterical.” “If you said something Dolly didn’t like she would speak in tongues,” recalls Allen Bloom.
Rosetta’s wedding drew thousands of out-of-towners, including Moe Gale and Decca executives, who came bearing a check and an offer of a new multiyear contract. But something about the evening had convinced Irvin Feld to doubt Rosetta’s future prospects. In Russell, now calling himself Rosetta’s manager, he saw more hindrance than help. Indeed, Irvin and Russell clashed during the week-long “honeymoon tour” of one-nighters that took the entire troupe south after the wedding. On their initial stop, a joint homecoming-marriage celebration concert at the Richmond City Stadium on July 5, Russell violated the terms of Rosetta’s contract with the Felds by selling his own concessions. To get him to stop, Irvin finally obtained a restraining order against him. The incident was relatively minor, but it spread tension among the ranks. It also hinted at the ways that Russell, in later years, would indeed help himself to the spoils of Rosetta’s stardom.
In addition to various singles, both solo and with Marie, Rosetta issued two Decca extended players (33⅓ rpm) in 1951: Blessed Assurance: Gospel Hymns Sung By Sister Rosetta Tharpe with The Rosettes and Organ Accompaniment and The Wedding Ceremony of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Russell Morrison (Russell’s name was written with a notable diminishment in typeface). Both consisted of spiritual music, but they were the fruit of contrasting endeavors. Blessed Assurance compiled contemporary as well as traditional material, and featured Rosetta singing—but not playing—on songs such as “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and “Amazing Grace.” It had the imprimatur of folklorist Alan Lomax, who contributed album notes that declared, “Sister Rosetta Tharpe is basically a folkartist, with a hold on a great folk audience.”15 The Wedding Ceremony was a novelty item, a recording of the marriage rites in their joyfully irreverent entirety (side A), complemented by selections from the celebratory concert that followed (side B). Far from folksy, it reveled in the pleasures of ostentation and cheeky fun.
Blessed Assurance was an earnest musical endeavor, while the wedding had been a stunt to keep Rosetta in the headlines. In this respect, it succeeded—but at a price. Even as the wedding had celebrated her standing as a gospel attraction, so it compromised some people’s sense of her as a legitimate artist. Ebony dutifully detailed the extravagance of the affair, in keeping with its habit of covering lavish society events, while at the same time holding its nose. If twenty thousand people came out for the wedding, the article implied, another twenty thousand stayed home from embarrassment or refused to patronize an event in such poor taste. In England, where she had already acquired an audience among jazz aficionados, Melody Maker complained that the wedding concert sounded “more like a circus performance than an act of the church.” Derrick Stewart-Baxter, opining in the English Jazz Journal International, found the wedding to have “the atmosphere of a cheap, phony publicity stunt.”16
Exhausted and ready to return to normal life, the Rosettes retired after the wedding tour. They had persevered through perilous weather and shows in dangerous places. They had put up politely with the intrusive oversight of Mother Bell. They had learned how to eat, sleep, and practice routines on a bus. They had made records for a major label and appeared on national television. And they had grown in their craft as individual singers and as an ensemble. “It was such a lifetime experience I wouldn’t trade anything for it,” says Sarah Roots, looking back. “But you couldn’t pay me to go do it again, because the first year was fun and new and adventurous, but the second, it was just a job, and it was getting to be monotonous.”
A few of the Rosettes followed in their mentor’s footsteps. In December 1951, six months after Rosetta’s wedding, both Lottie Henry and Sarah Brooks married, Sarah to Rosetta’s pianist, Jimmy Roots. Both resettled in Richmond. Rosetta didn’t stay there long, however. Now married for a third and final time, she was headed to Nashville and points beyond.