They Call Her ‘Holy Roller’: Rosetta Flies in to Rock London Daily Mirror, November 22, 1957
LONDON, November 24, 1957: Backstage at the Chiswick Empire Theatre, Rosetta was brimming with emotion. There she sat, as one observer put it, “with her head in her hands on the verge of tears, completely overwhelmed by the tremendous reception she had earned at her first London concert.” Although largely unfamiliar with gospel, the sellout crowd of almost 1,900 that had turned out to see the evening’s main attraction, the Chris Barber Band, had warmed easily to Rosetta’s performance. The audience had laughed at her jokes, clapped along to hits such as “Didn’t It Rain,” and called for more when she and the band fired off a New Orleans–flavored “When the Saints Go Marching In.” By the time she took her final bows, to thunderous applause and whistles, the annoyances of a malfunctioning amplifier that had rendered her electric guitar “a shambles of slurring sound” were all but forgotten. The music press showered her with favorable headlines. “Sister Rosetta Makes a Flying Start,” declared Melody Maker, Britain’s premier music magazine.1 For the rest of her debut European tour, cheering audiences and glowing reviews would follow Rosetta, first across the Channel to France, then on to Monte Carlo, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland.
After the imbroglio caused by her Decca venture into rhythm and blues just three years earlier, Rosetta delighted in her overseas triumph. The enthusiasm of audiences thousands of miles away from home—in places she had never been, among people who did not worship as she worshiped or eat what she ate or even speak her language—rejuvenated her spirits and rekindled her confidence in herself as a performer who still had it. The saints were right: God would lift you up; He wouldn’t leave you lost and alone, as long as you had faith in and tried to live by His holy word.
Rosetta’s rebirth as a star of the European blues revival began in late 1957, when Chris Barber, leader of Britain’s most popular traditional jazz band, invited her on a three-week, twenty-city British tour, for which she was reputedly to be paid £10,000, or roughly $28,500.2 Counting a brief trip to Canada with the Cab Calloway Revue back in the 1940s, it was Rosetta’s second international appearance, but her first as a star in her own right. She spent the weeks before the trip in her apartment back in Philadelphia, engrossed in planning. “It’s one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to me. I guess I’ll act like a typical tourist when I arrive in England. There’s so much I want to see and do,” she told Melody Maker a few days before her departure. “From what I hear from other people who have played for British audiences, it’s not just the sights that I’ll enjoy. You know, there is nothing like a friendly warm audience. It makes you feel that what you are doing and saying is reaching inside people.”3
Rosetta’s optimism—which, like many of her press pronouncements, has the feeling of being simultaneously canned and heartfelt—indicated that she had lost none of her youthful enthusiasm for conquering Europe. “I hear vicars in this country might feel a bit stuffy about my kind of religion just because I make a good living at it,” she joked to one reporter. “Why, I’ll play anywhere for free—St. Paul’s, Buckingham Palace, or Westminster Cathedral.”4 She was only half jesting—about playing for free, that is.
Rosetta had heard from musician friends about the allure of touring abroad: not merely warm audiences, but good treatment—which black performers couldn’t get in the United States in 1957—and a mainstream press that showered visiting Americans with attention. Back in Washington in 1951, neither of the city’s white newspapers noted Rosetta’s wedding concert, although it was a leading item on the national black wire service. In London, in contrast, from the moment her plane touched down, Rosetta was greeted as visiting musical royalty. Reporters flocked to her hotel room, eager to have a word with the American “Holy Roller.” What they found was a buxom “Negro” woman, elegantly dressed, smiling cordially, with a Les Paul electric guitar and an amplifier mixed in with her luggage.
It was touch-and-go at first. “I think she must have called a press conference,” recalls Ottilie Patterson, vocalist with the Chris Barber Band.
[The reporters] were all assembled in her bedroom, and they of course they had no idea what Sister Rosetta Tharpe meant. They thought she was a missionary, out to convert people and all that, and they thought she was a female Billy Graham, an evangelizing one. And they were asking her all these obscure questions . . . and I could see she was nervous and she wasn’t really equipped for conversation on that level, you could say that. And the more she would lighten up the more they hardened; these press guys were hard on her, you know? And she was getting herself into knots and whatever they asked her she would sort of say, Well it’s a gift, you know God gave me this gift. And I said, Sister, play “When I Move to the Sky.” And she plugged it in, and there wasn’t a dry eye when she finished. And they stopped asking her the hard questions, and they were moved, they were really moved. Once she opened her mouth, if you heard her at all, you had to be completely knocked over by her.
By the end of that first impromptu hotel room concert, pageboys had crowded at the open door to watch “Sister Tharpe” sing her spirituals with a rock-and-roll beat. “I’m just getting hep,” she wisecracked, smiling her sweetest “Jesus loves me” smile.5
Interest in Rosetta in Britain was part and parcel of a larger trend—the postwar blues revival, which saw the emergence of a white public who “sought a heightened reality in the realm of black [American] song.”6 British blues and jazz fans not only listened to records, but formed their own bands and spent time studying the music, compiling discographies, and starting blues and jazz journals. Seventy-eights by Jelly Roll Morton and obscure but revered blues musicians were hunted down and treated like newfound treasures rather than yesterday’s sounds. Occasionally, an expert such as Englishman Paul Oliver would go on an extended field trip through the Southern United States, searching for musicians whose careers, like their youths, had long since withered. (Some of these, like Joshua “Peg Leg” Howell and Booker T. Washington “Bukka” White, had already been rediscovered by white Americans such as Sam Charters and Ann Danberg.) Many of the old blues musicians had not played professionally in decades and had enjoyed only moderate success at their peaks, but the British revivalists gave them a platform for performing and touring, paving the way in turn for record reissues and blues festivals.
British and European fans saw themselves as key players in the struggle to keep African American blues and early jazz vital. “The British jazz revival movement took the initiative and helped to build up jazz-consciousness all over Europe,” observed Chris Barber in May 1961. Visiting Americans “are infinitely more honoured here than in their own country. . . . The incredible truth is that we now have to undertake the Herculean task of teaching the American public what jazz is.”7
“What always amazed us in England,” recalls former Blues Incorporated bassist Andy Hoogenboom, “was that like these fantastic musicians that appeared—not just [Rosetta], but people like Little Richard and, you know, Bill Broonzy, it was only years later that we realized these people were being totally neglected in America. You know, and they were coming over to Britain and blowing us all away. This was fantastic for us. It really was.” Hoogenboom and his friends paid close attention to what they saw and heard. “Keith [Richards] was a fanatic,” he recalls, “and Brian Jones was a total fanatic!”
The first African American blues musician to tour Europe in the postwar years was Huddie Ledbetter, the singer-guitarist “discovered” by folklorist Alan Lomax at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in the 1930s and touted for his physically imposing presence and rough-hewn authenticity; as Leadbelly, he was well known for the stunt of performing in prison stripes. He visited Paris in 1949, and then died shortly thereafter, penniless, in New York’s Bellevue Hospital. But by then, the legend of Leadbelly in Europe had been ignited, his records eagerly consumed well into the 1950s and beyond. “Leadbelly was very important,” recalls Martin Bernal, a scholar of ancient history who listened to Leadbelly 78s as a secondary-school student in Devonshire, England, in the early years of the blues revival. “I mean, he was ‘glamorous’ because he was from a jail and that made him attractive in that way, but his virtuoso, you know, twelve-string guitar-playing was just fantastic, his voice had a very nice timbre, and he had good tunes. . . . And it was moving to be involved in black suffering—obviously at some distance—and that, by the early ’60s, was extremely widespread. I mean in the ’50s we were a very small group.”
Although his concerts drew disappointing crowds, Ledbetter’s visit to France laid the groundwork for subsequent overseas appearances by the likes of Josh White, Lonnie Johnson, and, most famously, Big Bill Broonzy, who quickly became an idol of the blues revival. “For me the idea of hearing an American Negro singing the blues was almost unbearably exciting,” recalled George Melly, flamboyant vocalist with the Mick Mulligan Band, who saw Broonzy in 1951. “This was the first live blues music I’d ever heard in my life, the music I loved, and love above any other, sung by a great artist.”8 “I saw Broonzy, who was amazing,” says Andy Hoogenboom. “God, he was good. ’Cause all we’d ever heard were crackly old records that sounded as though they were recorded under the bed.”
Broonzy’s visits, which ended with his death a little less than six years later, inspired quite a few British jazz musicians to look into bringing other American performers to the U.K., where they could be heard and, perhaps more importantly, seen. Such, at least, was the desire of Chris Barber. Only two years after starting the Chris Barber Band with several college mates in 1954, Barber had acquired enough clout as a jazz celebrity in England to begin to think about sponsoring Americans on his own dime. When the chance came to realize his ambition to learn jazz “at close range, by example,” Rosetta topped his wish list. “We knew that in fact the vocal African American music was the source of the beautiful inflections and emotional intensity of all the jazz, so it seemed perfect if we could work with some of the great performers of that vocal music,” he recalls, explaining why he and the band were drawn to Rosetta. “And Sister had made some of our all-time favorite records, which we longed for the chance to add our voices (or even trombones) to. We had no particular hope of being good enough, but we had to try. . . . We just wanted to be near her while she was singing and playing [and] as much part in it as we might.”
“To hear her in the flesh!” recalls Ottilie Patterson, who says Rosetta’s voice sounded fuller and rounder—a little more like Marie Knight’s—in person than it had on record, where it came across as a little thin. “It was quite astounding. . . . The first time we heard her, there wasn’t a person in the band who hadn’t wiped their eyes for tears.”
Although they stood in awe of African American performers, British and European fans often tended to perceive them through what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “veil” of race, looking upon black music as an index of black suffering as well as innocence. Coming of age in the shadows of the wartime air raids and the revelation of Nazi horrors, and amid the identity-shattering upheavals of the loss of Empire, such young people turned to African American “roots” music, rather than the self-consciously modern sounds of bebop, in part because in those postwar years, it was still possible to gaze across the Atlantic in search of something sustaining. American cities, after all, had not been flattened by the terrible Luftwaffe raids. And yet while their interest was well intentioned, the revivalists tended to hear blues as the musical expression of misery rather than of perseverance, cultural memory, and healing.
“We were part of that generation that saw blacks as oppressed,” recalled John Broven, an Englishman who later cofounded Juke Blues magazine. “So there was that kind of moralistic approach to it. We felt that by supporting the blues, we were supporting the civil rights movement. There was that romantic side to it.” British journalist Val Wilmer, who spent time with Rosetta and Russell on several occasions during their visits to England, groans at the memory of how she “disgraced herself” in a 1960 interview by asking Rosetta “whether she felt Black people were better at music because of their ‘natural sense of rhythm.’ ”9 “I used to feel guilty about earning my living singing the music that was born out of suffering, other black people’s suffering,” says Ottilie Patterson, who grew up in postwar Northern Ireland feeling self-conscious about her “foreign-sounding” first name and Latvian mother, carelessly referred to by the local children as “that Russian lady.” “It seemed wrong for me to get so much happiness—and when I say happiness I mean musical happiness—in singing songs that were created by people who had lived it first hand.”
Sometimes this led to comical cultural miscommunications. When he debuted in England in 1958—for a ten-date tour with the Chris Barber Band—Muddy Waters, whose very name evoked the Delta, upended audiences’ expectations by playing electric rather than acoustic guitar, anticipating the ill-received electrified second half of Bob Dylan’s legendary concert at the Royal Albert Hall with members of The Band in 1966. But Waters had not been intending to play the bad boy; unlike Bob Dylan, he had no need to instruct anyone to “Play it fucking loud!” just to get in people’s faces. Mostly, he was confused by the seeming desire of English audiences to preserve blues in amber, as though it were not a living music. “Now I know that the people in England like soft guitar and old blues,” he told Melody Maker. “Next time I come I’ll learn some old songs first.”10
Calcified notions of the unspoiled earthiness of blues joined readily with stereotypes of the natural religiosity of African Americans, who in Hollywood films could often be seen offering up “Hallelujah!” and “Amen!” As in the reviews of Rosetta at the Cotton Club and Carnegie Hall in the 1930s, gospel as an expression of “the black soul” became a common trope in the British and European press. “If the coloured race are uninhibited in their secular music, how much more do they let themselves go in the ecstasy of religious fervour,” observed one critic in the (English-language) Zurich New Jazz Club newsletter. “There’s none of the white man’s pretty prettiness in the Negro’s approach to religion.”11 Swiss jazz fans weren’t alone in perceiving gospel as an unfiltered outpouring of African Americans’ naïve exuberance or utter wretchedness. “Most of her performances, both vocally and on guitar, have a magnificent passion and folk quality unspoiled by her appearances before sophisticated audiences,” remarked the eminent British jazz critic Leonard Feather, in his program notes for Rosetta’s second English tour, in March and April 1958. This was remarkably close to Alan Lomax’s idealized 1947 portrait, in which Rosetta appeared as a Popular Front heroine à la Woody Guthrie or Josh White. “Her voice rings out like the stroke of a steel blade on an anvil—it is a prophet’s voice ringing out hard and clear against the sins of this old world.”
No one would have been more surprised by the comparison than Rosetta, who tended to favor prophets like Dolly Lewis and knew plenty about “the sins of this old world”—as well as the new one. Europeans who made her acquaintance in the 1950s and ’60s recall a generous, vivacious woman, alternately pious and bawdy, who occasionally had a drink, often flirted, and generally enjoyed being the life of a party. They recall a forty-two-year-old traveling with her quiet husband who, like most American tourists, enjoyed seeing the sights and shopping in between gigs.
Because of overseas ignorance of gospel music and black Pentecostalism, Rosetta was frequently peppered with questions about her beliefs and her background. After the first disastrous interview in London, she learned how to respond with the deft touch of an improvising jazz musician. A typical interview might go as follows:
Do you really believe the words you are singing?
Yes, absolutely.
What kind of Negro Christians play music like yours?
Well, I am from the Sanctified church. Some people call us “Holy Rollers.”
Are all Negroes so enthusiastic about their religion?
In the Church of God in Christ, yes, but there are different styles. Some people make the songs sound very solemn, and they don’t put as much rhythm in them.
Where did you learn to sing and play guitar, and why do you play so loud?
I am what you call an autodidact. My musical ability was a gift from God. I also learned from my mother. I play loud because I want to express my happiness in the Lord!
Isn’t it strange to worship God with a guitar?
Not in my church. We like to worship Him with all the instruments.
Gospel music should be noisy!
Is it true the American Negro “swings” better than anyone else?
Yes, I suppose Negroes are generally better.
Who are your favorite singers?
I like so many: Mahalia Jackson, Brother John Sellers, the Reverend Samuel Kelsey, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Harmonettes, Cleophus Robinson, and of course my mother, Katie Bell Nubin! In pop, I like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat Cole.
What do you think of the people in our country?
Lovely! Everybody has been so kind! I hope I can return soon!12
Once she became comfortable with the press, Rosetta flattered and cajoled, exaggerating one moment and holding back the next; occasionally she told outright falsehoods, such as shaving five years off her age, when the fancy struck. To a reporter who asked whether the mezuzah she wore as a necklace “conflicted with” her religion, she replied that her great-great-grandfather had been a Jew (a possibility, but not one she had ever spoken about before). At one point, she even claimed that the church honorific “Sister” had been bestowed upon her by “some Jewish ladies” in Florida.
When Chris Barber had initially announced that he wanted to bring Rosetta on tour with him, his booking agents expressed skepticism. They politely reminded him that the Barber band was popular enough without an added attraction; they had already sold out their late 1957 British tour without benefit of Rosetta’s name. “We thought it was a good thing,” Chris recalls, “but the promoters said, ‘What do you want to bring [American musicians] in for? You’re going to ruin the show and people won’t come and see you.’ And we said, ‘Of course they’ll come and see us.’ ‘Well, you pay them with your own money then, the house is full anyway for you, I’m not going to pay you any more money for whoever you’re going to bring in.’ ”13
It was not the first time promoters were wildly off the mark in their predictions. Indeed, instead of ruining the shows for the Barber band, Rosetta rendered them bigger hits. She debuted on a Friday evening at Birmingham’s Town Hall, a venue that held about two thousand people. Chris had given Rosetta billing on the souvenir programs as “America’s Sensational Gospel Singing Favourite,” and that evening, she proved she was worthy of the title. The temperature in the hall rose palpably when she made her entrance after the Barber band, which typically played eclectic sets consisting of Dixieland jazz, obscure material from the 1920s, and popular tunes such as Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy.” From her experience playing auditoriums and stadiums throughout the States, Rosetta knew exactly how to hold a large audience’s attention. Tuning her guitar to an open C, she ended numbers by raking her fingertips over the strings and then, with the amplified sound still ringing out, raising her arms in a U-shape and tilting her head and eyes upward. It was a deliciously ambiguous posture, at once evoking religious supplication and the expectation of applause, the giving and the receiving of glory.
Whatever it was, prayerful or playful, the audience loved it, just as they loved it when Rosetta displayed her mastery of gospel vocal and guitar technique. In a single song, she sermonized and rapped, growling one moment and executing an elaborate glissando the next. On a sped-up arrangement of “Up Above My Head,” she urged on trumpeter Pat Halcox and clarinetist Monty Sunshine as they took solo flights. On “This Train,” she accompanied herself, playing with the dynamics of her electric guitar to heighten the drama of her performance.
Rosetta took an interest from the first in singing and playing with the Barber band—including vocalist Ottilie Patterson. “I wasn’t put down to do anything with her,” Ottilie remembers. “She had done a rehearsal with the band in the afternoon, but not with me. Then in the interval [intermission], she had heard me from side stage, and she came belting into my dressing room, and she said, You’re on with me in the second half. And I said, No I’m not! And she said, Yes you are. And all you have to remember is that when I say ‘You wanna be,’ immediately you answer ‘I wanna be.’ ” The song, as Ottilie quickly came to realize, was “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and when the time to sing it came—just after they and the band had run through “Old Time Religion”—she knew exactly what to do and how to do it, because Rosetta, a practiced duettist, created the perfect space for her counterpoint. The crowd was so thrilled to see Rosetta and its own homegrown jazz stars in one glorious improvisation that it wouldn’t leave the hall until the band played several encores—not additional songs, that is, but repetitions of what they had already played.
They were backstage, basking in the rapturous reception the crowd had given them, when Rosetta turned to Ottilie and announced, “You ain’t nothing but a white nigger.” “And she smashed her hand over her mouth,” Ottilie recalled, “and her eyes grew big with fear and terror at what she’d said! She got her wires crossed, because I mean I couldn’t have said it to her, and she thought she was insulting me, and I burst out laughing and said, You’ve just given me the best compliment I’ve ever had. . . . Oh, we got on like a house on fire!” It was especially gratifying for Ottilie, the lone woman in a band of men, to have a female traveling companion.
Performing with the white Barber band was quite unlike anything Rosetta had previously done. Ottilie wasn’t Marie, Chris wasn’t Count Basie, Birmingham and Leeds weren’t Atlanta or Greenville, and playing at London’s Chiswick Empire bore little resemblance to playing at New York’s Apollo. Indeed, her concerts before British and European audiences probably had more in common with her U.S. appearances at Café Society or Town Hall, where she played before liberal white American audiences. At the gigs Rosetta had been doing at black churches in the late 1950s, it would have been a sure sign of disaster if no one shouted back and or “fell out,” physically succumbing to the spirit of the music; abroad, in those same years, she would become accustomed to attentive, but less demonstrative, audiences. In Europe, they didn’t give the same credence to the words she sang or to the spiritual feeling she brought to a performance. They had to be encouraged to clap, and then helped to find the backbeat! Some didn’t even appreciate that gospel meant religious singing.
British gospel shows in the late 1950s lacked the glorious pageantry of American programs, which were commonly see-and-be-seen events. Ira Tucker Jr. remembers Easter Monday programs at the Met in Philadelphia, where the show would start at seven in the evening and continue until two in the morning. The women would parade with their men on their arms. “When I was a teenager, I’ll never forget, I used to go to the shows with my friends, and we used to watch them walk in, you know, and it would all be about getting the attention of everybody, you know, it was like, everybody would walk in with their man, and their man was all dapped out, you know? It was great.” The women that night would work to outdo each other to see who would walk home with the coveted hundred-dollar prize for the best hat. Once, Ira saw a woman with a real bird in a cage on her head.
Rosetta incorporated the whimsical spirit of such spectacle in the glittering gowns and accessories she wore for her shows in Britain and on the Continent. “Not too many [African American] artists came over then, so I can’t say that many people knew what kind of music she was playing, what were the roots of her style, but she was very well liked and completely at ease,” remembers Jean-Pierre Leloir, a French photographer who took pictures of Rosetta in the late 1950s, including several memorable portraits of Rosetta wearing her own rhinestone-studded guitar earrings.
As Elijah Wald points out, Rosetta made goodwill gestures toward her audiences, especially in France, where she would politely offer a “Merci beaucoup” in response to applause, or even acknowledge the kindness of “mes amis français.”
Those initial shows in Britain and on the Continent in late 1957 and early 1958 revitalized Rosetta. Artistically speaking, they buoyed her belief in herself, fulfilling her hope “that what you are doing and saying is reaching inside people.”14 Practically speaking, they put some needed cash in her pockets. But Europe was refreshing in other, unquantifiable ways. Clyde Wright, the Charlotte, North Carolina–born singer and longtime second tenor with the Golden Gate Quartet—a group that has made France its home base since the 1970s—knows how Rosetta must have felt to have people from another continent cheering her on, despite their cultural and racial differences. “Music is an international language, and what touches you, touches these people, and they don’t have to understand the words,” he says. “Like Louis Armstrong says, ‘A cat is a cat.’ I don’t care where you see them. . . . a cat is a cat, and people are people.”
Rosetta photographed in France, late 1957.
Photograph by Jean-Pierre Leloir.
In Britain and continental Europe, Rosetta was a cat. Writing of her three-week stint in Paris in early 1958, the influential French critic Madeleine Gautier noted that Rosetta “has a splendid voice, very black, which sounds like a trumpet.” The audience in Paris “could hardly resist her dynamism,” wrote Jacques Demêtre, a critic who had earlier visited the States on a research tour. “In certain pieces, she launches into sensational [guitar] solos, full of glissandos and vibrating notes, which I will not soon forget.”15
Wherever they traveled during that first tour, Rosetta and Russell—for, although Chris Barber didn’t expect him, in fact explicitly hadn’t invited him, this was one tour Russell was not going to miss—went about their daily lives with an ease unknown to African Americans in the United States in the 1950s. They were paid promptly (in cash), welcomed at hotels, enjoyed restaurant meals without incident, and had no trouble hailing the distinctively boxy London taxis. Like a lot of African American musicians, Rosetta found in Europe a welcome haven—if not from racism, then from the very particular and insidious insults of American Jim Crow. “We were handled in a prestigious way, the best hotels, the best food, an excellent bus,” recalled Len Kunstadt, who accompanied singer Victoria Spivey on a European blues festival tour in the mid-1960s. “The blues was performed in the same halls that Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms were performed in.” And yet the Americans, unaccustomed to such good treatment, sometimes responded with an understandable wariness to the hospitality extended them by white people, no matter whether they spoke with fancy accents. “A lot of the artists were bewildered by it,” said Kunstadt. “A lot of them were suspicious of what was going on.”16
“For a lot of these artists, sometimes unsung in the United States, Europe came across as an El Dorado,” recalls Willy Leiser, organizer of the Montreux Jazz Festival. “As soon as they arrived in a city, or in the theater where they were supposed to play, they found themselves idolized. You never knew who was more surprised: the public, or the musicians or singers they fetishized. Certain were given gifts, others were forced to submit to the ritual of interviews and photo-sessions, they were invited to people’s homes, where they were surprised by collections of rare records, most of which were unavailable in Europe. It was often the world upside down!”
Europe embraced black Americans in a way their own country did not. “I think the same for us is the same as for Rosetta,” says Clyde Wright, who debuted with the Golden Gates in Paris in 1954. “It’s prejudiced over here, but it’s a different type. It’s not the same thing that existed in America . . . it doesn’t hurt as much as back in the States, because you can walk in any restaurant in France and, you know, and you sit down, even at the time. And when I did come to Europe, I felt more free.”
The freedom he felt, as Clyde Wright makes clear, was relative. The French in the ’50s were “aware of the way blacks were being treated in America,” he says, and yet racism was endemic, less toward “American blacks” than toward “real African people,” especially Algerians. His experience mirrors that of many of the African American intellectuals who had migrated to Paris beginning in the late 1940s, including the writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin. As these expatriates came to realize—some, like Wright, reluctantly—the French were perfectly capable of granting honorary white status to African Americans, while treating North Africans with manifest contempt. The same year that Rosetta crossed the Atlantic for her first concerts abroad, Baldwin had grown disaffected enough, over conditions of Algerians in the French capital, that he took flight in the opposite direction, committing the better part of the rest of his career to fighting for the burgeoning civil rights movement in the United States.17
A gulf of experience and social class separated the community of black American intellectuals in Paris from most of the musicians who came to play there in the 1950s and ’60s as part of the blues revival. The paths of a Richard Wright and a Rosetta Tharpe likely never crossed in Paris, because, like other black intellectuals abroad, Wright gravitated more toward the “sophisticated” bebop of Dizzy Gillespie, played in smoky Parisian nightclubs on the Left Bank, the 1950s French equivalent of Café Society.
And yet their status as icons of Negro vernacular culture did not inoculate the musicians at the center of the blues revival, especially in Britain, against racism of a seemingly homegrown variety. In 1956, a bartender at a Leeds pub refused to serve Big Bill Broonzy, then at the zenith of his fame among British blues connoisseurs. When Broonzy asked why, he was told matter-of-factly, “We don’t serve Blackies.”18
Broonzy had been visiting the pub with Bob Barclay, the half-Scottish, half–West Indian leader of the popular Yorkshire Jazz Band and owner of Studio 20, a Leeds club. “Of course,” wrote Pearl Bailey in her memoirs, “the English don’t have too high an opinion of how we’re handling our problems, but they have one of the greatest of all race problems, I think, with their West Indian people, the people from their islands. In 1948 I saw people who looked like dogs lying in the street. They had ship’s ropes around their waists to hold their pants up.” One area of particular interest to American musicians was the multiracial district known as the Bay, or sometimes Tiger Bay, in Cardiff, the capital of Wales. Isolated by its physical location near the docks, the Bay was a place where people from India, the Middle and Far East, Africa, and the Caribbean lived and intermarried with the Welsh and English. It was known for its racial freedom and vibrant music scene, notes Val Wilmer. Neil M. C. Sinclair, a black Welshman, remembers that on one of Rosetta’s visits—probably her 1957 tour with the Barber band, which included two dates in Wales—Rosetta, “having been aware of the Tiger Bay legend she had to see us for herself. I remember she threw a handful of coins into the air and we kids darted about trying to collect them.”19
Rosetta and the Barber band gave one of the best performances of that initial 1957 tour on December 9 in Manchester, a city whose audiences were reputed to be among England’s best. Good press in the capital had elevated expectations, and Rosetta rose fully to the occasion, especially with her heart-stopping rendition of “Peace in the Valley.” Introducing it, she adopted a serious tone, paying homage to the man she had recorded with five years earlier. “And now I’d like to play for you a little song that I loved so very dearly,” Rosetta enunciated, in a voice that fell somewhere between the singsong supplication of a preacher and the polished sincerity of an expert saleswoman. “Red Foley, he loved it and he made this song, and I made it after him. . . . And I’d like for you to sit quietly and receive it because it’s wonderful.” She then proceeded to give the sort of performance that encouraged the opposite of quiet reception. At the outset, she stuck closely to Dorsey’s version, but by the time she arrived at the third repetition of the chorus, she launched into a glorious series of improvisational flights. Consciously using her voice as an instrument, she reshuffled words, editing some phrases and expanding others, while strategically interpolating “ohs” and “ahs” where the feeling demanded it. It was as though she were taking Dorsey’s text, making it into a jigsaw puzzle, and then dismantling that puzzle to reassemble it in a new and highly idiosyncratic way. When she finished, the crowd, moved and exhausted, applauded for more than a minute.
Backstage, the musicians were pretty spent, too. Each night, they played for several hours; by the time the tour ended, they would have played twenty nights out of twenty-four, all while traveling the length and breadth of the country together. The only one who didn’t seem overwhelmed by it all was Russell, Ottilie says. “Oh, he didn’t exert himself too much,” she chuckles, recalling Rosetta’s nattily dressed husband. “The band used to laugh because after we’d finish, we would finish the gig and there was a lot of excitement and we would all come offstage perspiring and sweating and Russell would see us backstage and say ‘Yeah, it’s been a long hard day.’ It became quite a byword in the band. ‘It’s been a long hard day. Yeah, Chris, it’s been a long hard day! Long hard day, Monty!”
The English music press unanimously concluded that Rosetta outplayed her hosts in late 1957. The Barber band, as Val Wilmer puts it, was “very clunky-clunk,” while Rosetta rose to “another league, aesthetically speaking.” Moreover, her performance made painfully clear the distance between the musical idiom of the jazz traditionalists—characterized, in George Melly’s disparaging words, by “the pianoless rhythm section, the relentless four-to-the-bar banjo, the loud but soggy thump of the bass drum”—and Rosetta’s more emotionally charged style.20 Looking back, Chris Barber defends the band’s work with her, however, suggesting that such criticisms were motivated in part by the very romanticizing tendencies that characterized the blues revival. “Our aim and desire for the band was to be a part of the living music, not to be either some sort of ‘Antique Forgers’ or imitators of somebody else’s music,” he says. “Some English jazz critics—self-appointed, of course—complained bitterly at us for ‘spoiling her wonderful music with our poor imitation stuff,’ and although we were sure we could do it properly, and so was Sister, we followed their wishes part of the time, against our better judgment, for fear that they were perhaps right. They weren’t.”
As for Rosetta, she was far too busy enjoying herself to criticize her hosts, if indeed she felt the need. Mahalia Jackson had made it to England six years earlier—in fact, she appeared at the Royal Albert Hall on a 1951 bill featuring Broonzy, further proof that when American gospel musicians went abroad, many of the usual taboos were temporarily lifted. Yet even if Rosetta wasn’t the first gospel soloist to tour Europe, her 1957 tour made her a preeminent heroine of the blues revival and its leading gospel protagonist. Abroad, not a few gospel lovers even considered Rosetta Mahalia’s superior.
Notwithstanding this interest in gospel, Rosetta’s British fans knew and loved her music the way they knew and loved jazz: because it was uplifting in a nonreligious way. “Most people on the jazz scene then—or at least those around the musicians, were devoutly secular,” notes Val Wilmer. “Thus many jazz fanciers were embarrassed by expressions of belief.” In a review of Rosetta on her second British tour, in spring of 1958, Melody Maker’s Bob Dawbarn conceded such discomfort. “Religion in popular song, with its phoney sentiment and doubtful theology, invariably makes me squirm,” he wrote. “Why, then, can I listen to gospel singers with unqualified pleasure? On renewing acquaintance with the art of Sister Rosetta Tharpe at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday, I feel the answer is a mixture of authenticity and sincerity. The philosophy may sound strange to European ears, but Sister Rosetta so obviously believes in what she is doing that one accepts it without question.”21
Others approached the question of Rosetta’s religious sincerity with less earnestness. When he first met her, George Melly feared that Rosetta would be “ostentatiously pious” and thus, by definition, not to his liking. Yet when he toured with Rosetta in spring 1958, he found a kindred spirit. “In fact,” he later remembered, “it was a rave. It’s true that Sister Rosetta, who could, as we discovered at a private session, belt out a marvelous blues, would never do so in public, but that was about her only strict rule. One of her numbers was called ‘God Don’t Like It,’ and the words were aimed at the most pleasurable human activities. It became clear to us within the first two days that if she believed in what she was singing, she must realize that she was causing the Almighty almost non-stop displeasure, but that there was no sign it bothered her at all. On stage her performance was splendid, although we all found her introductions a bit strong. The sentimental piety of these was, however, in part relieved by the outrageous way she managed to plug her recordings in the same breath as the love of Jesus.”22
Rosetta could be a hoot offstage as well. During her 1957 tour with Chris Barber, Rosetta arranged for photographer Terry Cryer, a member of the band’s traveling entourage, to marry his girlfriend—in a modest ceremony that recalled her own Griffith Stadium extravaganza only in its use of musicians as the wedding party. As gifts, Chris presented the couple with a reception after the band’s Bradford concert, and Rosetta footed the bill for them to stay two nights in an elegant hotel. Photos of the wedding ceremony made the paper, and Cryer’s association with the ebullient Sister Tharpe made him, for a day or two at least, a minor celebrity.
On another occasion, Rosetta and the Barber band were appearing at Grimsby’s Central Hall, a venue that doubled as a main meeting place of the local Methodists, who were dubious about religious songs played with an electric guitar. “The whole auditorium was rocking to Sister Rosetta’s music,” recalls Les Triggs, former secretary of the South Bank Jazz Club. “The overwhelming reaction from the audience and the demand for encores was so great that I recall Ottilie Patterson . . . being a little peeved as she had difficulty getting on the stage to perform. Harry Lannigan, the minister in charge at the hall, had held reservations about ‘hot gospel’ being performed in a Methodist church, but he was so knocked out by Sister Rosetta’s performance that after the concert he gifted her one of his favorite Bibles.”
In 1958, Rosetta toured Scandinavia with the British Diz Disley band, featuring a young Ginger Baker, the drummer who would go on to fame as a member of Cream and Blind Faith. The first time they met at rehearsal, he recalled, “She said, Hey honey, I love your hair color. What dye do you use? Her hair was bright red. When I told her it was natural she said, You’ll have to drop your pants to prove it!” On another occasion, Rosetta displayed her tenacity when she accidentally fell off the platform at the Copenhagen rail station, after a long trip from Stockholm “in a compartment with some Danish military happily drinking.” As “a little girl stepped forward to present her with a bouquet of flowers,” Rosetta “stepped off the train and disappeared,” Baker remembers. “All that was visible was her head and shoulders.” But even then, Rosetta “didn’t stop smiling,” although she had two “huge grazes on her shins.” “I was her favorite,” Baker says, “and she used to give me huge smiles on stage, especially during her show stopper ‘Didn’t It Rain.’ I loved her.”
With success all over the Continent, Rosetta was quick to inhabit the role of gospel star. Everything about her exuded fabulousness: from her stuffed-to-bursting wardrobe bags to her wigs—variously described as blonde, auburn, or “flaming orange”—to the scent of her Arpège perfume. But what young blues aficionados mostly noticed was Rosetta’s guitar playing. “I had no idea who she was, I mean just this great player suddenly appeared and we went, Wow listen to that! She was stunning,” recalled Andy Hoogenboom, who saw her at the Humphrey Lyttelton Club, a London hangout for blues aficionados.
Not only were we not used to playing blistering guitar, but we weren’t used to a woman playing blistering guitar. . . . She was ripping the wallpaper off, you know. What you have to understand is we were only just starting to play electric guitars, you know, we were still playing jazz and skiffle and that kind of stuff, and to suddenly hear this kind of booming blues music, you’d think, Wow, I must do some of that!
What struck really strongly was how, I mean, I didn’t even know the word “visceral” then, but it was. It came at you from a completely different direction. Very much like when I first heard Elvis Presley. I was 14 years old and suddenly, there’s Elvis, you know, and it was like a light coming on, you know, it was the whole country, everybody of my age was listening to that music all at the same time, you know, and it was a very powerful experience. And I think when you came across, I dunno, people like Little Richard, the first time I saw Little Richard it blew my socks off. What do they say—the hairs on the back of your neck stand up at moments like that? That happens, you know, and she [Rosetta] had the same effect. One minute we were just clowning around being in a club together and suddenly there was this great playing going on. Not that the Chris Barber band weren’t good, but this was markedly different and it had a real “American” feel to it as well, which [was] a very important thing.
What blew the socks off Hoogenboom and other young Brits leading the blues revival was Rosetta’s innovative use of the electric guitar as a solo instrument with its own distinctive power of speech. Most of the songs Rosetta played for her English audiences—whether “Down by the Riverside” or “Didn’t It Rain”—had a similar structure, beginning with a verse and maybe a chorus, climaxing in an electric guitar bridge, and then ending with more singing. It was a bit like a Pentecostal preacher’s routine of warming the congregation up, bringing it to a frenzy of shouting and dancing, and then bringing it down to earth again, sweating and exhausted and satisfied. But Rosetta had managed to render the preacher’s routine in her staged performances, introducing European listeners to a kind of secular rapture. While performing what were, strictly speaking, gospel songs, she displayed the nascent possibilities of contemporary lead rock-and-roll guitar: playing loudly, drawing out notes, playing for maximum visual impact, making the guitar “talk.” For a whole generation of English blues rockers coming of age in the 1960s, like their Southern white counterparts a decade earlier, Rosetta’s playing constituted an important model of the electric guitar as the lead rock instrument extraordinaire.
At home in the late 1950s, the storm clouds of displeasure at Rosetta’s venture into the pop realm dissipated as quickly as they had gathered, largely because of her stardom abroad. Beginning as early as 1958, major African American news outlets around the country—in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Chicago, Memphis, and Norfolk, Virginia—began touting Rosetta’s popularity in Europe, establishing her as an internationally renowned artist in whom American Negroes could take pride. Rosetta’s international fame fit squarely within what Elijah Wald calls the “aspirational ethic” of the bourgeois black press; if she had played to full houses in chic cities like Paris, London, and Monte Carlo, the reasoning went, then she might be forgiven her tastelessness of years past. But the appeal of an international reputation also cut across class lines within black communities. For many church audiences who invited Rosetta to perform in the late 1950s, it was enough to know that she had gone overseas to preach and to sing her gospel songs.
Rosetta’s visibility in the British blues revival also caught the attention of the primarily white folk-music audiences rallying around black roots music as the U.S. folk revival was gaining steam. Like the blues revival in Europe, the folk revival was driven by serious-minded, educated young people with disposable income and countercultural aspirations. In the late 1950s, in response to what they viewed as the commercial abomination of rock and roll, the folkies were discovering spirituals, blues, work songs, and prison songs, including the work of Brother John Sellers and Josh White—the last ironically considered “inauthentic” by English jazz fans. To the young Americans, these constituted an authentic, indigenous American music, not the pandering dross played on commercial radio, especially the soulless stuff that made teenage girls scream.
In such an environment, Rosetta quickly discovered the value of the folk credentials Alan Lomax had bestowed upon her in his notes to her Blessed Assurance album a decade earlier. If “folk” was the rage among a record-buying public of earnest young people, then “folk” she would be. In 1958, she was one of the acts on opening night at a new Los Angeles nightclub, the Avant Garde. By the following October, she appeared with fellow blues revival favorites Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry—the latter an alumnus of From Spirituals to Swing—at New York’s Town Hall, on a bill featuring white South African balladeers Marais and Miranda and white folk singer Ed McCurdy. The sons and daughters of those most likely in her audience that night would later patronize places like Gerde’s Folk City to see Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker.
Thanks to her success abroad, Rosetta had the luxury of focusing on domestic appearances and of setting her affairs straight in Philadelphia in 1959. She did some dates with the Chris Barber Band when they came to the United States on two separate occasions that year, their reputation boosted by the unexpected popularity, in the spring of 1956, of “Rock Island Line,” an old Leadbelly song remade by ex-Barber-band banjoist Lonnie Donegan. Despite what they knew they might encounter, Chris and Ottilie were nevertheless appalled by segregation. In Alabama, they wandered by mistake into a Ku Klux Klan town, and in New Orleans, home of the music they loved, they found that the Jazz Society “was all white guys” (in Ottilie’s words) and that the municipal auditorium prohibited them from appearing onstage with black musicians. By a strange twist of fate, that same year, Rosetta opened at the Dixie Manor, Kansas City’s first white club to allow African American patrons and performers. It was indeed the world upside down.
Perhaps Rosetta’s most memorable concert of 1959 was a cruise with steel guitarist Willie Eason. On July 27, she and Eason, an old friend, plus a multiracial crowd of several hundred spectators, boarded a cruise ship docked at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Wharf for an event billed as “The Biggest Battle of Songs and Guitars Ever to Be Held!” As Willie’s wife, Jeannette Eason, recalls, however, “They didn’t have a contest between each other, they just played” until everyone was exhausted. By the end of the evening, after several go-rounds of “Ninety-nine and a Half Won’t Do,” says Jeannette, “Willie’s sitting in the chair”—as he’d have to be, to play an instrument that rested on his lap—“but she’s down on her knees in front of him playing this guitar. . . . Everybody, they were just happy, they said both of them was the same. One wasn’t no better than the other one. . . . But the funniest part about it,” Jeannette continues, is that “the boat never sailed.” Upon discovering that the motor didn’t work, the boat’s owner came up with a clever solution. “Well, they rocked the boat, and when people come off, everybody was saying, Oh my God, what a smooth ride! Said you couldn’t even tell you were moving! . . . So, they had a fantastic program there that night, I mean, everybody . . . on that boat.”
In late January 1960, Rosetta traveled to New York for an appearance at the Apollo Theater hosted by WWRL deejays Fred Barr and Doc Wheeler; among the featured guests on the bill were the era’s leading acts, including the Caravans and James Cleveland. So impressive was that show that Barr and Wheeler had Rosetta back as the headliner in May, on a bill featuring Cleveland (then riding high on the popularity of his hit “For the Love of God”), the Gospel Wonders, and the Consolers, among others. Tony Heilbut, who was in the audience at the Apollo, remembers Rosetta stealing the show both nights he saw it. By then, he recalled, “her voice had lowered an octave, and she chanted more than she sang.” But “it made no difference. One night she came out in tailored street clothes, in worldly contrast to the billowy robes of the Caravans. She romped through ‘This Train,’ hitting fancy riffs, holding her guitar notes while making silly faces as if to say, Well, my, my, think of that. In her own words, she ‘cut the fool.’ ” When she sang “Peace in the Valley,” he added, “she had truck drivers rolling in the aisles. Rosetta cut some steps herself, after judiciously removing her guitar.” On another number, she performed with Ma Bell, who got the audience to holler back at her when she sang “Ain’t No Room in the Hotel.”23
A number of younger artists recall Rosetta’s mentorship of them backstage at the Apollo gospel “caravans,” shows featuring several acts. “She was so comforting,” recalls Ella Mitchell, who started out with Professor Charles Taylor and then joined James Cleveland. “Sometimes before I get ready to go I get so nervous and she would say, Oh don’t be nervous honey. She says, You know what, get in the corner, and take the Lord out on that stage with you. Yes she would. And she taught me that! And I do it right today.” “Rosetta’s voice had in my opinion never changed,” recalls Sullivan Pugh, singer-guitarist with the husband-and-wife duo the Consolers. “It was an honor to work with someone who had toured overseas.”
After her “comeback” years of 1957–1959, Rosetta found herself busier than ever in 1960, with engagements that had her crisscrossing the Atlantic literally from month to month. On March 30, 1960, she returned to England for her third tour—her second with the Chris Barber Band—where she attracted noticeably younger crowds than she had only a couple of years earlier. English teenagers had begun to catch on. “People in this country were ready for something exciting and dynamic and rooted and soulful,” says Val Wilmer, then still a teenager herself. “Elvis was revolutionary and exciting, but this”—meaning Rosetta—“was more authentic.” In fact, Rosetta made it clear to Wilmer that gospel was at the root of all the modern sounds that were so popular among young people. “Blues is just the theatrical name for gospel,” she told her in April 1960, “and true gospel should be slow, like we start off with ‘Amazin’ Grace.’ . . . Then you clap your hands a little and that’s ‘jubilee’ or ‘revival’ . . . and then you get a little happier and that’s jazz . . . and then you make it like rock ’n’ roll.”24