She was so strong in her convictions. She didn’t let nobody change her around. She just believed that what she was doing was what God had given her.
Ruth Brown
Diabetes, for all its deadliness, is a quiet disease. By the time people manifest even one of its relatively benign symptoms—an odd bruise that doesn’t heal, numbness of the hands or feet, bouts of disorientation that resemble drunkenness—the illness usually already has set in, sometimes seriously so. Often diabetics are surprised to learn that they have been living with the disease for years, while feeling relatively healthy.
Like a lot of African American women of her generation—women who grew up poor and spent the entirety of their lives working—Rosetta never knew she had diabetes until she had what was almost certainly a stroke in Switzerland. And like a lot of women in her position—women who grew up in the Sanctified Church, where the healing power of prayer is a central tenet of faith—Rosetta didn’t put much stock in the medical profession, never managing to find the time to see a physician regularly. Why should she have cared for doctors, when no white hospital would have admitted Katie Atkins back in Arkansas in 1915? Even when she began to put on extra weight in the 1960s, she didn’t worry too much about it, as long as she felt relatively good and could continue performing.
Rosetta’s friends, generally less chary about doctors, found themselves frustrated in their attempts to get her to seek medical care when she returned to Philadelphia after her stroke. Tony Heilbut remembers Rosetta telling him that they all should be drinking grapefruit juice as a cure for diabetes, perhaps because she imagined the acidity of the bitter liquid would counterbalance the “sweetness” in her blood. Rosetta’s sister-friends, meanwhile, did everything but literally drag her to a physician, that winter of 1970–1971. “Rosetta, she had this diabetes, and I started going to her doctor for a while, and her doctor would tell me to please bring Rosetta in because she had something that was going to kill her if it wasn’t treated,” Roxie Moore remembers. “But I would call Sister and say, Sister, have you been to the doctor? And she would say no, and I would try to persuade her to go. [The office] was right across the street from her.”
“Rosetta’s sickness is what stopped her from the road,” says Ira Tucker, confirming Roxie’s memory of events. “When Rosetta came from Europe, she had sugar so bad that my wife and Roxie tried, begged her, ’cause our doctor was her doctor, and he said, Louise, if you see Rosetta, please tell her to come. We told her but she didn’t do it.” Even Marie, telephoning in from New York, tried to persuade her old friend and partner to get medical aid, but like all the others, her pleas were ignored.
Rosetta assured everyone she was fine, and just to prove it, she acted her usual joke-cracking, ebullient self, inviting the Philadelphia crowd over to dinners where she would treat everyone to meals of the highly seasoned Southern soul food she favored. Then one evening, Roxie remembers—it was not long after Rosetta had returned from Switzerland—“Louise and I went over to the house . . . and she had this little dark spot on her foot. And she said, ‘Look, Sisters,’ she said, ‘This spot is sore.’ And I said, ‘Well, Sister, you have to go and check that.’ ”
The “spot” in all likelihood was an ulcerous area caused by problems in circulation and exacerbated by a weakened immune system. But even with her foot bothering her, Rosetta resisted seeking medical attention for another several weeks. By that point, gangrene had set in, and when she finally checked into Temple University Hospital, the doctors saw no other course of action but to amputate the leg.1
This was a dreadful blow, even to a woman with as much energy and resilience as Rosetta. Not only did the amputation leave her depressed and weakened, but it threatened her ability to step around while she sang and played. “That leg, when she lost that leg, she lost a lot of passion,” remembers Ira Tucker Jr. “Because she was used to being up on that stage and moving around, and she couldn’t do that. But she kept that energy up in terms of friendships and these people coming by, you’d never know there was anything wrong with her. But she had the real, real bad sugar.”
As soon as Rosetta was well enough after the surgery, however, Russell had her booked onto the church circuit again. There were programs at distinguished COGIC institutions, such as Washington Temple in Brooklyn, as well as out-of-the-way places in small towns throughout the South. Perhaps Russell saw it as a way of protecting Rosetta, keeping her busy doing what she knew and loved best so as to stave off her depression and worrying. But most of Rosetta’s friends saw Russell as looking after his own needs, without regard for Rosetta’s health. Many believed she should have been resting, rather than running from place to place. But there must also have been tremendous pressure, since, as Rosetta and Russell both knew, without the money she made performing, they had little to live on.
Even before Rosetta’s leg was amputated, Russell had been sensitive to people prying into his private business. One time, when Roxie was in the middle of one of her “Sister, get yourself to a doctor!” lectures, Russell picked up the phone mid-conversation and told her, “You take care of Roxie, I’ll take of Rosetta.” “And when he said that to me, then I didn’t know what to think, you know,” Roxie recalls. “So, I stopped bugging her. . . . I don’t know,” she adds, “Russell, at that time, he was so protective of her. You know, I didn’t quite understand it. But when a woman has a husband, there’s only so much you can do.”
Ira Tucker took more liberties in speaking his mind to Russell. “Rosetta was working actually when she was sick,” he recalls. “I used to tell Russell, Russell, that’s your wife, but man, why don’t you stop Rosetta from working, now, she’s sick, man!” Rosetta would defend her husband, telling Tucker, “Brother, I got to make it; I have to make it. Russell say I can make it.” And then Tucker would have no choice but to concede: “That’s your husband. I can’t go over him, you know, I’m just your play brother.” Yet it pained Tucker as much as anyone to see Rosetta sweating it out there in little churches, when he knew she was suffering. “She worked, see,” he says emphatically. “Don’t never let nobody tell you that lie, Rosetta Tharpe worked until she couldn’t.”
After her operation, Rosetta taught herself to do programs seated, not unlike the way she practiced playing guitar at home or when casually jamming with friends. At other times, when the spirit struck her, she dropped all pretense of worrying about how she looked and hopped around on stage on what friends call “her one good foot.” “She was crazy even with the one leg,” says Ira Tucker Jr. “She didn’t let the disability stop her.” In fact, when she was feeling well, Rosetta turned her disability into a dramatic advantage. Gospel had a long tradition of singers flailing their bodies around on stage for the theatrical effect; Ira Tucker himself was famous for the trick of going down on one knee and then being helped up to standing again, in a move that made audiences go wild. The Holy Dance, an important aspect of Sanctified worship, created opportunities for congregants and church leaders alike to give themselves over to displays of self-abandon. In this important sense, Rosetta’s physical disability did not compromise her ability to perform authentically. “She used to hop around, she used to sit on the floor, and she would bounce around on the floor as opposed to get up and walk with the cane,” Ira Tucker remembers. “She’d rather just bounce around, yeah, that’s what she was doing.”
Margaret Allison of the Angelic Gospel Singers visited Rosetta after the operation and recalls her friend’s determined good spirits as well as her bodily theatrics. “I went to the hospital to see her, and she was an amputee, you know,” Allison remembers. “She was laughing and talking with us, you know, because she said she was surprised, she didn’t know she was a diabetic . . . and after that, after she got well, she started back singing again, because she was talking to me, and was telling me I should have seen her hopping around on stage. She was really jolly. She just said to me, she said, Sister, you should have seen me hopping around on stage with just one leg!” “Well, thank God you can hop around!” Allison replied.
The spirit of levity didn’t assuage Allison’s fear that Rosetta was merely putting a happy face on a terribly trying situation. It would have been just like her to make you feel comfortable, Margaret says; Rosetta “was a lot of fun,” always making it so in her presence “you could feel free to laugh and talk and say whatever you want to say.” “Rosetta was jovial,” Roxie agrees. “She always had a joke to tell, and she always laughed.” On stage and in private, she enjoyed being histrionic, trying out different moves to get attention as much as to see how others responded. “But how she was doing,” recalls Margaret Allison, “I really don’t know.” It may have been a moot point in any case, she adds; Rosetta “didn’t really have a choice about hopping around because Russell was still depending on her.”
“Russell, if it was up to Russell,” laughs Ira Tucker Jr., “she’d a worked seven days a week. Russell would’ve worked [her] seven days a week if he could have. I’m telling you, if he could have got that deal he would have taken it, and he would have stood there on the wings and applauded for her as she came off sweating and tired and fingers bleeding and the whole shot. He would’ve kissed her on the cheek and walked her to the dressing room and helped her get ready for the next show. That was Russell. No, she worked, she worked all of the time.”
Even in her illness, Rosetta resisted the stereotype of the tragically ravaged black female entertainer, a living emblem of society’s ruthless treatment of both women and African Americans. Unlike Billie Holiday, who did her last gigs looking drawn and exhausted, an emaciated distortion of her healthier, begarlanded self, Rosetta did not generally attract the sort of mock-sympathetic, unseemly fascination with her decline that so plagued Lady Day. Mostly she avoided this through humor—the same weapon she had used against racism in the ’40s and ’50s. She never tired of joking, “Oh, plug me in, Daddy! Ooo—feels so good!” when she was getting her amplifier in order. That is not to say she did not suffer, however; Tony Heilbut recalls calling her on the phone only to find her weeping with pain, talking about how hard it was to go on. At other times, the suffering was emotional. “You had to be very resilient to have been Rosetta Tharpe and then be doing fifty-dollar freewill offerings,” Heilbut says.
In general, Rosetta’s fans did not regard her with the unctuous self-interest of the merely voyeuristic; they wanted to see her triumph over her adversity. It helped that diabetes lacked the social stigma of illness from drug and alcohol abuse. Her Philadelphia friend Walter Stewart, a prominent deejay, worried, however, that Russell was parading Rosetta around shamefully, like a charity case. On at least a few occasions, he remembers, Rosetta performed with the gospel duo of Yvonne and Yvette MacArthur, Los Angeles–born twins conjoined at the head, giving their programs—the singing “Siamese sisters,” the “one-legged, guitar-playing lady”—a decidedly freak-show quality. Russell “would get the money,” Stewart remembers. “She was sick. Her words were slurred. It wasn’t pleasant for me.”
Tony Heilbut, who lived in New York, saw Rosetta frequently in the early 1970s. When his seminal history The Gospel Sound appeared in 1971, he took the train down to Philadelphia to read Rosetta the sections he had written about her. Heilbut’s memories of these visits of 1971 and ’72 are mixed. On the one hand, Rosetta reassured him by playing the role of her old flirtatious, teasing self, confiding in him about sexual fantasies and crushes. One, he remembers, involved Joe Boyd, the young white manager of the 1964 American Folk, Blues, and Gospel Caravan. “I’ll get them yet!” Heilbut recalls Rosetta joking, in reference to Boyd’s buttocks. In Heilbut’s mind, a fifty-five-year-old woman who could get a little silly about wanting to pinch the ass of a man less than half her age still had plenty of life left in her. At other times, however, she confessed to pain and to neediness, acting like the “motherless child” she sang about in the spiritual. “Daddy, Daddy, I’m feeling all cold,” she would say, recalling the words she pronounced when they put Mother Bell in her “cold, cold” resting place in the ground.
In the years when Rosetta was touring Europe, and even while she was ill, Marie and Rosetta had managed to keep in touch and even stay close, although the distance, together with the demands of their respective lives, made face-to-face visits rare. In the 1960s, while Rosetta was crisscrossing Europe and influencing many of the major players behind the British Invasion, Marie pursued a moderately successful rhythm-and-blues career, touring with the likes of Brooke Benton, the Drifters, and Clyde McPhatter. After “breaking up” with Rosetta in the 1950s, she had also grown closer to Dolly Lewis, for a time living with Lewis and her husband in Oakland, California, and then later, after Dolly’s divorce, living with Dolly in New York. Sometimes Dolly, who was born in 1910, would introduce Marie to strangers as her daughter, says Walter Godfrey, a friend and fellow member of Washington Temple, although it was well known that the two were not related.
In the late 1950s or early 1960s, Dolly founded Gates of Prayer Church, first in a structure on Amsterdam Avenue, later at a location on 145th Street in Harlem. As Floyd Waites, longtime church pianist, explains, “Gates of Prayer was based on the prophecy of Dolly Lewis”—to her congregants a charismatic and “sighted” pastor, capable of performing miracles of healing. Dolly never took credit for her gift, Floyd says, instead insisting that she was a conduit for messages, not their source. Wherever her power came from, Floyd experienced this gift the first time he walked into Gates of Prayer in the mid-1960s, still a relatively recent arrival to New York from Alabama. “I was invited to the church,” he recalls. “And I went one Sunday morning, and as soon as I opened the door and walked in, she said, There’s a piano player right there. And I looked around to see who she was talking to because no one knew; they knew I sang but they never knew I could play, you know, piano. So she said, Go sit down and play ’cause yeah you can play. And so from that Sunday on I was with her.”
Back before Dolly died in 1990, Floyd recalls, “many, many people came through the Gates of Prayer visiting. Not just ordinary people,” he emphasizes, “we had people like Esther Phillips, Baby Washington, LaVern Baker . . . and Professor Alex Bradford.” Before she passed away, Baker even became a Gates of Prayer regular. But by far the most memorable guest Waites can remember is Rosetta Tharpe. The announcement that she was to perform at Gates of Prayer in 1971—and sing with her old partner, Marie Knight—was enough to produce an overflow of excitement in their little building, which could hold seventy-five or eighty people comfortably, maybe one hundred in a squeeze. Someone made the wise decision to schedule two services, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, so perhaps two hundred people were there. Some thoughtful church members even had a special chair with a cushion fixed up for Rosetta—ironically, the same woman who years earlier had delighted Gordon Stoker by making “I Can’t Sit Down” her theme song.
Yet if Rosetta sat with her guitar—a brown Les Paul guitar, in Floyd’s memory, not the flashier white SG—no one else in church sat that Sunday. “Did she perform!” Waites exclaims.
Wow. I was missing a whole lot of notes listening to her and that guitar! She was fabulous. And you know the concert she did, she and Marie performed songs together, and at one point Rosetta did some of her favorite hymns, just guitar along with the Hammond organ and my piano playing. And then, the highlight of that performance? ‘Didn’t It Rain’ and ‘Precious Memories’ rocked that little church. . . . I’m telling you, it was wall to wall, both performances. And when she pulled back on that guitar [for] ‘Didn’t It Rain,’ her solo? Oh my Lord! It was fantastic! It was just like [the audience] would go off in like a hysteria. You know . . . like she had a small amplifier for her guitar and when she would hit off on those solos they would have to, like, kind of tell the people to like calm [down] you know, [so] we could hear that guitar. It was just that great. You know, even with the amputation of her leg, it didn’t affect that, her voice nor her playing.
Even in the 1970s, Rosetta and Marie had a spiritual connection that to Floyd seemed unbroken. Marie had always talked to Floyd and his wife, Evelyn Waites, about enjoying those years with Rosetta, and she always gave her friend credit for giving her a chance to make it. Marie had love in her heart for Rosetta, he says; if she wasn’t talking about her she was thinking of her. He illustrates with a story: At Sunday morning Gates of Prayer services, Reverend Dolly liked to “narrate” a song for Marie to sing. “Precious Memories,” she would declaim grandly, as though she were beginning an oration, and Marie would come in on cue. “And sometimes during these different times,” Floyd recalls, “[Marie] would get very full, you know she’d be thinking about Sister. You know. Uh-huh. Yeah, she be getting asked, ‘You gettin’ kind of full now, you think, sister girl?’ She’d say, ‘Yeah, that Sister [Rosetta] got me.’ But it was always a high time, you know.”
Rosetta’s last major public appearance was on July 26, 1972, at Lincoln Center, where she shared a billing with her friend Marion Williams. The show was part of Soul at the Center, a twelve-day festival of black arts organized by Ellis B. Haizlip, an important behind-the-scenes architect of the black arts movement. Soul at the Center was a landmark in both Haizlip’s and Rosetta’s careers, albeit for different reasons. For Haizlip, it represented the culmination of a longstanding ambition to bring African American artists to a hallowed hall of New York City high culture. For Rosetta, Soul at the Center represented official public acknowledgment of her status as a living gospel legend. In many ways, Soul at the Center poignantly circled back to John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concert thirty-four years earlier. That concert, organized by a sympathetic white supporter of African American artists, introduced Rosetta to a crowd of progressive whites, for whom she performed a largely unknown music. The 1972 concert, organized by a black man with black people as an intended audience, showcased gospel as a taken-for-granted form of black American music, and situated Rosetta as gospel nobility, rather than a charming novelty.
Nothing emblematized the differences between the two concerts more succinctly than their respective titles. From Spirituals to Swing was the creation of a historical moment that believed fervently in “uplift.” From X to Y: the name of the concert itself signified linearity and clarity in the pursuit of Progress. From Spirituals to Swing said, in effect, that if black people could survive slavery—and not only survive but produce the glorious music of the spirituals—then “swing,” a relatively modern invention, heralded the day when they would no longer labor under the stigma of race.
Soul at the Center put signifying before such symbolic earnestness, beginning with the indeterminate meaning of the word “center.” (As for “soul,” it couldn’t be defined, and if, in 1972, you had to ask, clearly you didn’t have it or know where to find it.) Was the “Center” in question only or primarily Lincoln Center, the arts complex named for the president who had “freed the slaves”? Or was it a “center” of a more general and more abstract kind: the center of the arts, perhaps the center of America itself? What if, to take the pun a step further, “Soul at the Center” meant that soul itself was central? What if soul—and what if gospel as the soul of soul—constituted the soul of American culture? And what if blackness itself were not marginal but deep at the core of Americanness, and thus ineluctably central to the cultural inheritance of every citizen, not just those who were marked by race?
Thanks to performers like Rosetta, in the years since From Spirituals to Swing, black music had moved, culturally speaking, from the margins to the center. When she took center stage that July evening, she was much changed from the lithesome, dimpled, brown-skinned girl recently up from Florida, who performed a music then virtually unknown outside of certain black churches. In 1972, she still had the dimples and the smile, but she was a larger woman and a larger presence. Not only had she popularized the music they were celebrating that evening, but directly or indirectly, her spirit had infused everything from the rock and roll of Chuck Berry to the rockabilly sounds of Elvis to the groovy, tripped-out summer of Woodstock only three years earlier. She had demonstrated that a woman of artistic and spiritual conviction could carve out her own path in what Soul Brother Number One James Brown had called “A Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” By the time Rosetta took to the stage at Alice Tully Hall, Don Cornelius, 1970s TV’s black impresario par excellence, had set the Soul Train in motion, taking the old religious metaphor of the gospel train, which Rosetta had sung about for forty years, one step further, its point of arrival no longer the Pearly Gates but outer space.
The extraterrestrial metaphor of a “soul train” fit the moment well. “We’re going to leave vibrations at Lincoln Center that will make it impossible for culture to be defined in New York without black people,” Haizlip announced to the New York Times.2 Hammond had promised cultural vibrations of a modest sort for a single evening. Haizlip had his sights set on unleashing cultural “vibrations so strong, so mean”—as he put it, in words that bespoke revolution—that they would permeate the atmosphere forever, like a cosmic jazz performance by the mystic and pianist Sun Ra. To fulfill this vision, Haizlip had recruited poets Nikki Giovanni and Jayne Cortez; singer-musicians Taj Mahal, Bobby Womack, Carmen McRae, Esther Phillips, Donny Hathaway, and Nina Simone; jazz musicians Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Cecil Taylor, Betty Carter, and Mongo Santamaria; the all-female rock-soul group LaBelle; and, of course, Rosetta and Marion Williams. From one perspective, Rosetta’s vibration was the longest lasting, since she was the link, the only musician who appeared at both Hammond’s and Haizlip’s events.
Attendance for Rosetta’s and Marion’s show was disappointingly sparse—less than four hundred—but that didn’t diminish the spirit they raised. Rosetta took the stage first, introduced by Joe Bostic, the WLIB deejay and gospel promoter who had booked her into the Apollo in the 1940s. She sang a number of old songs, just as she had in Europe, just before her stroke: “That Old Time Religion,” “Down by the Riverside,” “Precious Lord,” and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Slowing down her usual fast tempo, Rosetta stretched the songs out, infusing each with a melancholy air. She had illness and death on her mind, and testified in between numbers about her amputation, her mother’s death, and even the death of her mother-in-law, Allene Morrison. She cried and the audience cried. When she tearfully told the audience, “I’ve got Jesus in my heart. I’m glad to be alive,” one man in the crowd “was so moved that he tossed Rosetta a handkerchief so she could dry her eyes.”3
Tony Heilbut found the concert a bit lachrymose, especially Rosetta’s tears about Mother Morrison, who until her dying day, in November 1971, had never tired of reminding her daughter-in-law of her preference for light-skinned women. Yet he still found that “she had all the goods. . . . She could still do ‘Beams of Heaven’ and ‘Precious Memories’ and wreck the church.”
It was after Soul at the Center that Heilbut, a gospel producer of some clout, set out to get Rosetta a contract for a new album with Savoy. He arranged a deal whereby Fred Mendelsohn would produce, although he himself would have a hand in the selection of material. Heilbut had done some writing, and had penned a new song, “I’ve Got a Secret Between Me and My Lord,” a 12-bar blues, that he thought might be perfect for Rosetta. She was excited about getting into the studio again, he said, and so they set a date for recording in a Philadelphia studio in the early fall of 1973. In the period leading up to the session, Heilbut occasionally visited the house on Master Street, where he and Rosetta would work out arrangements, almost always on her acoustic guitar, but occasionally on the piano. He told her the record would be best if, rather than fighting the changes in her voice, she made conscious use of them, giving the old songs a “soulful,” contemporary flavor.
“Dear Rosetta,” he wrote to her from New York, in a letter posted a few weeks before the session:
Here’s my suggested lineup:
Move On Up a Little Higher There’s a Great Change
I Looked Down the Line
Hide Me in Thy Bosom (Rock Me)
The Storm Is Passing Over
Motherless Children
Uncloudy Day Bring Back Those Happy Days
Mountain Railroad
Just to Behold His Face
I’ve Got a Secret
Love O Love O Wondrous Love Divine
I enclose the lyrics to most of these songs. I’m looking forward to the recording session!
Love,
Tony4
Everything seemed fine, and yet there were bad omens. On October 3, 1973, the Wednesday before the session was to take place, Heilbut found out that Herman Lubinsky, the owner of Savoy, needed to postpone it by several days, until October 8. The second bad omen came on that date, a Monday, when Heilbut showed up at the house on Master Street to accompany Rosetta to the studio, only to ring the bell and find no one home. Sensing that something was wrong, he called the studio, where someone said that Russell had called in to say that Rosetta had suffered a massive stroke and been rushed to Temple University Hospital for treatment. Together with Walter Stewart, he drove to the hospital and joined Russell at Rosetta’s bedside. Things at the hospital were grim. Rosetta was not in a private or even semiprivate room, as Walter Stewart recalls; to him it felt more like a public ward, certainly not befitting a person of Rosetta’s stature. Worse still, Stewart remembers seeing blood on Rosetta’s face, and this struck him as an unforgivable affront to a woman who had always been so meticulous about her appearance. All of them, not just Stewart, worried that an African American woman in a diabetic coma was at risk of being treated like another statistic. As Stewart recalls, Heilbut—the only white person at Rosetta’s bedside—was practically in hysterics, pleading with the staff to treat Rosetta with the care due to a “great, great artist.”
Meanwhile, Stewart kept saying her name: “Rosetta, Rosetta,” enunciating the “t” as though from the repetition of such a precise mantra he might pull Rosetta back to consciousness. But she never emerged from her coma. By the time Roxie could get off work to rush to the hospital, Rosetta was already dead. The date of her passing was October 9, 1973—one day after she was to have recorded her new Savoy album. The death certificate, which listed her occupation as “gospel singer,” identified the cause of death as cerebral thrombosis due to atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease due to diabetes: in layman’s terms, a blood clot in the brain.
Shortly after her death became official, Russell and others set about the dismal task of making calls to out-of-town friends to convey the news. When Marie heard from Dolly that Russell was on the line asking for her, she remembers thinking, “After all these years he wants to talk to me.” She was concerned that Russell’s neglect of Rosetta in life would extend to lack of proper care for her in death. She told Russell she would be down to Philadelphia as soon as possible to see to the funeral arrangements. “We lived our lives together,” she recalled. “We shared with each other while she was alive. . . . I only wanted[ed] to see her buried as the person that she was.”
Rosetta left no will, effectively leaving what material possessions she owned—chiefly the cars and the house on Master Street—to Russell. Louise Tucker, Ira’s wife, took some of her gowns. But there was little money for a funeral and interment. Marie says there was an insurance policy from Metropolitan Life that Russell didn’t know about until Rosetta died—one that could be used to cover expenses—but if there was, there is no evidence its proceeds were collected.
The viewing took place at Baker & Baker Funeral Home, 2008 N. Broad Street in Philadelphia, on October 15, the day before the funeral. More than 170 people—including neighbors from the Yorktown area, a number of ministers and evangelists from Philadelphia, and friends and family from as far away as South Carolina—signed their names in a condolences book.
The next evening, William Gray III, son of Congressman William Gray, who had recently stepped down from his role as pastor of Bright Hope, led the service. It wasn’t modest, as Mother Bell’s had been, but neither was it majestic like the funeral of Mahalia Jackson, who had died in January 1972 and whose Chicago memorial was attended by throngs of mourners numbering into the thousands. Marie was there, and Ernestine Washington, and the Tuckers, and Roxie, of course, and Walter Stewart and Tony Heilbut. James Davis from the Hummingbirds attended, as did Paul Owens, a singer at various times with the Hummingbirds, the Swan Silvertones, and the Sensational Nightingales. Scores of Philadelphia neighbors, including Frances Steadman, Margaret Allison, and Marion Williams, came to pay their respects, as did Tommy Johnson of the Harmonizing Four, who made the trip up from Richmond. Only two of the former Rosettes, Barbara and Oreen, were able to attend, so Erma, Lottie, and Sarah, feeling bad about missing the chance to say goodbye to the woman who had been like a mother to them, instead sent a bouquet in the shape of a guitar. A number of relatives from the Atkins side of the family showed up, including Emily Kennedy, Rosetta’s older half-sister. Gospel singer Sally Jenkins, who had sung on Rosetta’s Mercury album The Gospel Truth, came to pay her respects, as did other assorted friends from Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Walter Stewart remembers the attendance as scanty; he thought the city of Philadelphia should have stepped in to do something to honor one of its most accomplished citizens. Mostly, he puts the blame for the “shabby” funeral on Russell. “I don’t remember there being a lot of anything. I wouldn’t call it a major funeral in any way. I don’t think her husband cared about things like that. I think his source of living was gone.” Rosetta’s half-sister Elteaser Scott remembers it differently. “That church was full,” she says. “Most of the whole family was there. They came from Milwaukee to Camden, they were all there, most of them. So she had a big funeral. That church was full.” Margaret Allison recalls it as “a nice funeral. See, a lot of people didn’t think Rosetta lived here in Philadelphia,” she says, explaining why more gospel royalty didn’t show up. “I don’t know where they thought she was at. Because after she passed, I was talking to some people and they said, ‘Where did she live?’ ‘In Philadelphia.’ ‘Well, where did she live in Philadelphia?’ ”
But Allison also speculates that Rosetta, in death, was something of the outsider she had been in life.
A lot of people didn’t know about it, but some of them probably wouldn’t have went if they had known. See, a lot of the religious people, they had a thing about her, because when she left gospel and went into the other field, and singing with the band and all that, well they just thought that was awful. And then when she came back, when she tried to come back to the gospel, a lot of people never accepted her. In fact, even on the shows that we were on with her [in the ’60s], she would always apologize to the people for her leaving. . . . She would just talk on stage, she would say like, she would tell like, she was brought up in church and religion and everything, but then she would explain to them how she left the gospel field.
At the service, Marion Williams sang “Precious Lord” and Marie did “Peace in the Valley.” Roxie read a statement from The Four Kings Gospel Singers, written on behalf of the citizens of Camden, Arkansas, in honor of their relative, Rosetta Tharpe, and then she read the eulogy she had composed:
Almighty God in His infinite wisdom and tender mercy has taken away from our midst, our Beloved Sister, Rosetta Atkins Tharpe Morrison.
Rosetta was a loving, kind, warm and generous person. She was the first nationally and internationally known Female Gospel Singer and recording Gospel Star.
She started her career at the age of six with her late Mother, Mrs. Katie Atkins Nubin who was an Evangelist in The Church of God in Christ nationwide.
She and her mother toured this nation many times over, and many sinners were converted, saved and sanctified and Baptized with the Blessed Holy Spirit under their ministry.
She was criticized by a few but loved and adored by many. For all who knew her in her youth, know of her dedication to serving the church faithfully and reverently and her devotion to her Mother and to Saints of God.
She started out when the going was rough and when the gospel was not very appealing, because the churches were far less affluent and the only thing to be gained was a hope of Salvation. But she sang in season and out of season. She would sing until you cried and then she would sing until you danced for Joy.
She and the great Songstress, Madame Ernestine Washington, the wife of Bishop Fredrick D. Washington of Brooklyn, N.Y. were childhood friends and the two of them sang for thousands each year at the National convocations of the Church of God in Christ, in Memphis, Tenn., when they were only teenagers. They helped to keep the church alive and the Saints rejoicing.
There is so much about Rosetta’s early life, so many good things, that the world at large have never heard about. But those of us who have followed her career know that she was great on the inside.
She was a loving Daughter, a loving wife, a helpful friend and she always testified of God’s goodness to her and her undying love for Him. She suffered a lot but she realized that if we suffer with Him we shall also reign with Him. For the way of the Cross leads home.
We are sure that she has found Peace in the Valley. Altho she loved her husband dearly and desired to live because of him, she had to cross over to see her Lord, for all Jordan had to get back last Tuesday morning and let Rosetta cross over to see the man that she Sang about in her Songs!
We’ll miss her, but God willing we’ll meet her.
Respectfully, (Mrs. Roxie Moore for) Friends and Family.5
Afterward, they went back to Master Street, where Russell, according to Marie, was stingy with his wife’s mourners, including family members from her father’s side. She recalls going to the undertaker’s, where she says she fixed and set Rosetta’s hair—as she had in the late 1940s when they traveled together—and dressed her friend in a full-length lime gown. The memory, filtered through the tear-stained veil of grief, evokes the tenderness between two women who had shared intimacy as singers and “sisters” for almost thirty years.
Russell had Rosetta’s body interred at Northwood Cemetery, six miles north of Yorktown up Broad Street, almost to Cheltenham, in a grave with a concrete base. He had paid about one hundred dollars for the single plot, the depth of which suggested that he might, one day, rest there with her. He never bought a gravestone to mark the site where his wife’s body lay.
Indeed, although Marie insists Rosetta was buried with her white SG, rumors circulated after the funeral that Russell had sold the instrument to an unnamed collector for a “trifling sum,” on the order of $250. According to Annie Morrison, Russell sold the guitar to a friend in the gospel field who lived in New York. Some people talked behind Russell’s back, thinking it wrong to put a price on something so associated with Rosetta, but he may have feared for a future without his wife’s earnings. As Annie puts it, “You know Russell wasn’t gonna bury no guitar in the ground when he could get some money for it.” He also sold her mink coat and, at Annie’s urging, Rosetta’s Lincoln Continental. “The only thing he would not sell was the piano,” she recalls. “He never said why.”
It was a decrescendo ending for a woman who had lived life in a grande dame manner and who had prided herself on putting on a good show, no matter the circumstances backstage. Ella Mitchell, who sang with Rosetta back in her splendid 1960 appearance at the Apollo, had come down for the funeral from New York. “She always wanted to do things well,” Mitchell recalls. “She always wanted to make sure it was very well prepared, and then go ahead and do it, putting the best foot forward at all times. And she did it with ease, like it wasn’t no problem, like this is what I was born to do.”