Every now and then someone would come around like Sister Rosetta Tharpe that really made an impression on you.
Gordon Stoker
At the conclusion of her “honeymoon” tour, Rosetta and Russell retreated to Barton Avenue. But while Rosetta welcomed the return home, Russell was restless. “He didn’t like Richmond,” says Annie Morrison matter-of-factly. To a self-made man who had found Pittsburgh too cramped for his teenaged dreams and who had never lived below the Mason-Dixon Line, Richmond seemed perilously Southern and provincial, a place sorely lacking in the hustle and bustle (especially hustle) on which Russell thrived.
Russell’s antipathy to Richmond irked Marie, who stayed in touch with Rosetta, although they once again went separate ways. It was enough that he had insinuated himself so completely into Rosetta’s orbit; that he couldn’t even bring himself to disguise his impatience with life in Richmond seemed arrogant and selfish. Since Rosetta’s money paid for the roof over Russell’s head—not to mention the car in the driveway and the new clothes on his back—she didn’t think he had a right to complain. Marie had always felt wary of Russell, and this new development only fed her mistrust.
Rosetta coasted for a time on the wedding concert’s adrenaline boost of publicity, spending the money she made from it as quickly as it came in. Like many musicians, especially those who grew up poor, Rosetta gave little thought to the financial details of her career. It was more satisfying to spend her earnings than to attend to the details of investing them. On the road in the South, she frequently opened her pockets to fans who clearly needed the money more than she did. She had William J. Bailey, her attorney and sometime road manager, take care of her legal affairs. To Russell she left the everyday details of collecting fees and paying the bills on time.
In 1952, Rosetta was no longer the nation’s most popular gospel soloist; that title clearly belonged to Mahalia. To many listeners, Rosetta had begun to sound countrified and old-fashioned. On the other hand, she could still claim importance and even uniqueness as a gospel guitarist. The image that photographer James Kriegsmann had created around 1938—of a player organically connected to her instrument—had not lost its luster. In the postwar period, Rosetta was the only “hot” guitarist in the gospel world, not merely the only woman guitarist. Moreover, whereas many acoustic players had faltered once electric instruments became common, Rosetta made the switch gracefully. Her expressive singing was in some ways better suited to the electric instrument, with its greater sustain, than to the acoustic guitar, on which she by necessity had a “busier” style. With the electric guitar, “there’s a cohesiveness between the way she plays and sings, which wasn’t there in her acoustic,” notes writer and guitarist Elijah Wald. “She had to deal with huge rooms of shouting parishioners. . . . She and T-Bone [Walker] to me are the two people who really invented an electric guitar that was not simply an imitation of an acoustic.”
Both highly ambitious and keenly aware of the fragility of her success, Rosetta made a point of remaining open to changing musical currents. Her harshest critics leveled charges of capriciousness and opportunism at her, failing to notice her versatility and ability to adapt. Yet, despite her resourcefulness, it was unclear how and where Rosetta would carve out a place for herself amid the rapidly changing musical landscape of the 1950s. An astute listener in late 1951 could already hear murmurings of a growing impatience with the musical aesthetics of even five years earlier. Singers like Nat “King” Cole and Bing Crosby still appealed to large and diverse audiences, but more viscerally emotional and personally expressive voices were finding their way onto the hit parade. Some of these spoke in Southern accents, others in Spanish; still others—newly emboldened by their outrage at a nation that would allow black people to fight its wars but would not desegregate its schools, neighborhoods, or workplaces—experimented with assertive new sounds that coalesced into bebop, doo-wop, and mature rhythm and blues. Major labels still had a lock on many of the day’s big-name musical talents, but for several years they had been feeling the pinch of the younger, more creative and risk-taking independents. In 1954, one of these small labels, Sun Records, would put out a single called “That’s All Right,” by an unknown singer named Elvis Presley. Before long, young people all over the United States would be clamoring for this new music and calling it rock and roll.
Country music, too, was changing quickly in the early 1950s. At Castle Studios, Decca’s recently established Nashville outpost, producers Paul Cohen (brought down from Cincinnati) and Owen Bradley had begun working with a group of crackerjack young musicians including upright bassist Bobby Moore and guitarist Grady Martin, who had played on Rosetta’s recordings of “Silent Night” and “White Christmas.” Together, this “A-Team” of studio players were hitting their stride as the force behind an emerging “Nashville sound,” smoother and more pop-friendly than the country music of yore. Along with Castle’s innovative engineers, known to put a lot of “level” in their recordings, they were helping to transform the city from a Southern outpost to a music hub to rival established centers like New York and Chicago. Already, people were using different language to describe the sounds coming out of places like Nashville. In a sign of the times, Billboard had ceased using the word “hillbilly” and adopted the awkward, if modern-sounding, amalgam “country & western” as an official category.
It fell to Cohen and Bradley to figure out how to capitalize on these trends for Decca. By 1951, they had begun experimenting with bringing marquee names south for two- or three-week Nashville stints, in the hope of taking advantage of the national craze for country ditties like “Tennessee Waltz,” sales of which were approaching those of “White Christmas”—something inconceivable just a few years earlier.1 Even Crosby was experimenting with a “countrypolitan” sound; that March, he would record at Castle Studios with Grady Martin.
Rosetta immediately warmed to Paul Cohen’s proposition that she come down to Castle Studios for some sessions at the beginning of 1952, especially when he mentioned his intention of having her record a duet with white singer Red Foley, who helped put Nashville on the map with massive late 1940s hits like “Tennessee Saturday Night” and “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.” Decca had been so certain of Foley’s commercial potential that they’d signed him to a lifetime contract in 1941, and he’d spun plenty of gold for the label in the decade since.
Red and Rosetta were not friends, but they had met before, in Los Angeles around 1949, when Rosetta and the Rosettes were doing some West Coast dates. It’s possible that they discussed the idea of collaborating then, but more likely, they simply said hello and chatted a bit before parting ways. It was a case of mutual admiration, according to Lottie Henry: Foley liked Rosetta’s music, especially the guitar picking that set her apart from other gospel soloists, while Rosetta admired Red’s big, lush baritone, the kind of warm voice that made you want to curl up inside it and take a nap. Rosetta especially enjoyed his rendition of “(There’ll Be) Peace in the Valley,” the Dorsey standard that was a favorite of white singers. In the 1950s, a lot of performers would try their hands at it, and although Elvis scored a million-seller with the song, Red’s version is more affecting. His approach to the song’s simple opening lines (“Oh well I’m tired and so weary but I must go along / Till the Lord will come and call me away”) elevated it from a flimsy affirmation of faith to a profound commentary on the meaning of life lived amid harsh circumstances. The key lay in Red’s languid pacing; instead of rushing the words, he sang them unhurriedly. His timing was the perfect musical analogy to the song’s message of trusting in God to set the tempo of one’s days.
Released the same month as Rosetta’s wedding concert recording, Red’s “Peace in the Valley” solidified his reputation both as a gospel singer and as a favorite of African Americans audiences. “ ‘Peace in the Valley’ was a wonderful song,” recalled Harold Bradley, producer Owen Bradley’s brother. “After Red recorded it he’d attract a large black audience when he went out on the road.” Such was the regard with which black Nashvillians held Red that when a young black boy died, his family asked the vocalist to sing “Steal Away to Jesus” at the boy’s funeral. Red “loved and respected black people,” said his son-in-law Bentley Cummins. Growing up among black people, “he got a feel for their music. He was able to project this in his performance.”2
Lottie Henry and Sarah Brooks were among those black fans listening when Red came out with “Peace in the Valley.” In fact, he had been on their radar since the late 1940s, when he became host of the Prince Albert Show, the Grand Ole Opry network radio broadcast. As children, they and their friends had listened to music on Arthur Godfrey Time, named for its folksy, ukulele-playing host. On Saturday afternoons, they looked forward to the treat of ten-cent movies starring Roy Rogers or the singing cowboy Gene Autry, the latter a particular favorite with Lottie. Their time touring with Rosetta only corroborated what they knew from experience—that Southern audiences went for both types of music.
Sarah’s and Lottie’s memories reveal a world in which sounds crossed social barriers, even if, as black Americans, they could not. Music was not a source of transcendence, but it could and did create overlaps and alliances that defied common wisdom about race, class, and region. “You have to understand that the South was full of country-and-western sounds—hillbilly music, we called it—and I can’t recall a single Saturday night [in the early 1940s] when I didn’t listen to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio,” recalled Georgian Ray Charles.3 LeRoy Crume, a Missouriborn singer-guitarist with gospel groups, including the Christland Singers, the Soul Stirrers, and the Staple Singers, remembers growing up in Chicago and tuning in to WJJD, the nation’s first “big-city” country station, to hear Red Foley, Tex Ritter, and Lefty Frizell. When journalist Ben Grevatt interviewed Clara Ward about her favorite singers in 1959, he reported in Billboard that she “repeatedly referred to the great country singer, Red Foley,” and his recordings of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” and “Peace in the Valley.” “These are great records and great songs,” Ward told him. “And we do both of them often.”4
Although associated with New York, the site of her nightclub and recording debuts, Rosetta had what Sarah calls a “country way”—nothing she can identify specifically, but just something you could hear in her music. Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires attributes this to her approach to guitar. “She had a lot of guitar beat,” he says, “a guitar slap-beat that a lot of country songs have.” Tony Heilbut, the producer and writer who worked with Rosetta late in her career, notes that Rosetta parted ways with other Sanctified singers in her approach to meter, which on songs like “Rock, Daniel” is “much more akin to hillbilly than to the loping, graceful rhythms of gospel.”
Cultural critic Greil Marcus has called Rosetta “the black church in the Grand Ole Opry,” and indeed, even before she came down to Nashville to record, she had racked up considerable experience at the Ryman Auditorium, the Opry’s legendary home.5 In 1946, she brought the house down for two nights running as part of a bill with the Fairfield Four, the enormously popular Nashville-based quartet that got regular airtime on radio station WLAC. Seven thousand people came out to see Rosetta in Nashville on Thanksgiving Day, 1949, and that same year she and the Rosettes, still newcomers to the touring life, appeared on the venerated Opry program itself.
Like the Pentecostal Church, the Ryman Auditorium, known as the “mother church of country music,” originated as an interracial institution. At midcentury, however, its heterogeneity had diminished; if anything, the field of country music was growing more segregated, the music considered more and more the exclusive bailiwick of white performers. As the 1950s wore on, it became rarer and rarer to find African American recording artists like Sister O. M. Terrell, Rosetta’s contemporary in the Sanctified Church, who released several gospel-flavored “hillbilly” sides for Columbia in 1953. By 1962, the year Ray Charles—billed early in his career as “The Only Colored Singing Cowboy”—released Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, such sounds were no longer associated with black musicians, largely because of marketing categories that relegated them to rhythm and blues. As O. B. McClinton, a Mississippiborn Baptist preacher’s son, observed, “You can take a black guy to Nashville from right out of the cotton fields with bib overalls and two watermelons in his back pockets, and they will call him r&b. You can take a white guy in a pinstripe suit who has never seen a cotton field, take him to Nashville right out of a subway in Manhattan, and they will call him country.”6
A duet between Rosetta, the flamboyant gospel guitarist, and Red Foley, the suave white prince of country, thus cut across the grain in 1952, even if, musically speaking, it was anything but farfetched. According to Gordon Stoker, Paul Cohen probably saw it as a way of cashing in on the combined audiences of two of Decca’s top moneymakers in their respective fields. “I assure you, if Rosetta weren’t selling some records at the time, Cohen would never have paired her with Red,” he says.
Duets were at the peak of their popularity in the early 1950s. But what Cohen may not have realized is that, in pairing Rosetta and Red, he was helping to make musical history. In the course of commercial popular recording, had two well-known stars of different races—people who, in Tennessee, were legally prohibited from marrying—ever appeared as a duo? When Foley and Kitty Wells, country music’s two biggest stars at the time, paired up in 1953 for the duet “One by One,” listeners could imagine the two as a couple. Unlike Foley and Wells, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (married in real life), or later, the African American rhythm-and-blues duo Mickey and Sylvia, Red and Rosetta could not claim the intimacy of lovers, although their voices would intertwine in song.
Despite what made Red and Rosetta’s collaboration remarkable, Bobby Moore, who was in the studio with them that January day, can barely remember the session, let alone recall it as a watershed. The mood, he says, was laid back and friendly, as it always was, not solemn with any awareness of history in the making. Walking into Castle, Rosetta would have found a studio like any other: a small room with a sound board where the engineers did their mixing, and a larger room littered with a messy jumble of microphone stands, loudspeakers, and other assorted equipment. If it was like the sessions that Gordon Stoker later witnessed as a member of the Jordanaires, then Rosetta and the young A-Team musicians—Bobby and Grady Martin, as well as guitarist Jack Shook and drummer Farris Coursey—probably were having a good time while they ran through a few practice numbers under Cohen’s or Bradley’s watchful eye. Rosetta could be counted on to play the cutup in the studio. “She was so cute; she had such cute sayings,” Stoker remembers. “She had the studio laughing. I mean, engineers laughing, everybody laughing that was around her. She had a good attitude about everything, and a good spirit.”
Good-naturedly competitive when it came to her playing, Rosetta might have made musical mischief by challenging fellow guitarists Grady and Jack to a little friendly rivalry, playing their fancy riffs right back at them. Word had it she only needed to hear new things once or twice before she committed them to memory. Or, being the only woman in the room that day, she might have teased the young men, calling them her “white babies,” as she had Gordon and the other Jordanaires when they toured briefly together in Nashville a few years earlier. “Everything that we did with her was with a smile,” Bobby Moore remembers, comparing Rosetta with Dolly Parton, another vivacious female singer-guitarist with whom he later recorded.
The smile Moore remembers may also have been protective; as gospel musician Alfred Miller points out, flirting, as Rosetta used it, was not merely a way of getting along with the men, but a means of elevating herself above the fray of racism. Not for nothing had Rosetta instructed the members of the Rosettes to “keep a smile on your face and your big mouth shut”; she herself had learned, no doubt from hard experience, that a smile was one way to ward off what was euphemistically called “trouble.” Rosetta disliked confrontation even more than she disliked dealing with other people’s assumptions about her, and smiling was one strategy—a particularly effective one, it turns out—for disengaging from potentially hurtful situations.
In the morning session before Foley arrived, Rosetta, Jimmy Roots, and the Castle musicians laid down the masters of three songs, including “Tell Him You Saw Me,” a revamped arrangement of the Thomas Dorsey song “If You See My Savior.” Along with the Millie Kirkham Singers, Rosetta and the A-Team rendered Dorsey’s ultimately hopeful narrative—about a person watching a friend die and pondering his own time-bound humanity—brooding and atmospheric, like a cowboy dirge or a blues about cosmic homelessness. Bypassing the verse, which in Dorsey’s original contains a starchy description of the friend approaching death, she and the band launched right into the more emotionally immediate refrain, with its hypnotic repetitions and striking second-person address. Rosetta’s performance had an uneasy solemnity, evoking the spiritual on which Dorsey’s song was based.
By the time Red got to Castle for the afternoon session, the mood in the room was good, recalls Bobby Moore. The weeks leading up to the session had been difficult ones for Red; that previous November, his wife of more than a decade, Eva Overstake (better known professionally as Judy Martin), had committed suicide. There was no somberness, however, in “Have a Little Talk with Jesus,” a slight, spirited number by the African American preacher-composer Cleavant Derricks, which Red and Rosetta recorded. As material, “Have a Little Talk” was a wise choice, inoffensive enough to pass the muster of those who might question the propriety of a Foley-Tharpe collaboration. Indeed, with both voices addressing themselves to God, the song deflected attention away from the relationship between the singers except as partners in prayer. In the early 1950s, it would have been difficult to come up with something less controversial than a white man and a black woman promoting Christian faith—not political protest—as a solution to everyday troubles. You don’t have to carry your burdens around with you, Derricks’s song insists: “Just a little talk with Jesus makes it right.”
The recording was pleasant, but it failed to generate spiritual heat. “She had a deep voice, he had a deep voice, but the two of them together just wasn’t the greatest match,” says Gordon Stoker, a little regretfully, as though he still wishes it could have worked out. Listening to the record, he notes that the difficulty of the pairing lay in Red’s and Rosetta’s different approaches to timbre and phrasing. Whereas Red had sweetness and depth in abundance, his voice sounded glossy and practiced next to Rosetta’s, which had greater emotional immediacy. They approached rhythm differently, too. Hovering behind the beat, Rosetta sounded at times as if she was rushing to catch up to Foley, whose feet were planted more firmly atop it.
Paul Cohen must have shared Stoker’s view of “Have a Little Talk with Jesus,” judging by Decca’s failure to market the single. Ultimately, the label slapped it on the back of an undistinguished Red Foley and the Sunshine Boys cover of Rosetta’s arrangement of “Strange Things Happening Every Day” that had been languishing in the vaults for more than a year. The song never turned up on an album by either musician. Bobby Moore, who after the 1952 session teamed up with Foley on the popular television show Ozark Mountain Jubilee, cannot recall a single instance during that period when Red mentioned Rosetta. After 1952, Red Foley and Rosetta never recorded or performed together again.
Yet even if it is not remembered, “Have a Little Talk with Jesus” is memorable. “It’s a significant record because of who was doing it,” says Ron Wynn, a Nashville-based country music writer. If Red had joined Kitty Wells in the studio that day, “Have a Little Talk with Jesus” would not have told the same story. By pairing Rosetta and Red, however, the record captured a unique moment in time and space. For that fleeting moment, the tangled relationships of black and white, of country and gospel, came clearly into focus, illuminating their complex webs of artistic influence and the centrality of Rosetta in Nashville, the home of country music. On “Have a Little Talk,” Red and Rosetta—and the histories they embodied—“talked” briefly with each other. Their record went on to be shelved on the B-side of history, but it still told a vivid story.