We all respected her for what she could do. She opened doors for a lot of people, whether given a lot of credit or not, she did. She made everybody feel important. Everybody was somebody with her, and everybody was just as important as she was. I mean, she knew no big I’s and little you’s. She just knew people to be people.
Inez Andrews
To pay respects today at the grave of Rosetta Tharpe requires a bit of persistence. Since no stone marks the exact site, a visitor to Northwood Cemetery in Philadelphia needs to inquire at the main office, a cheerless room, where one of the managers will go to a file and pull a sort of index card with information about the location of “Morrison, Rosetta Tharpe.” The card provides a number that corresponds to a plot, but the map of the cemetery is unreliable, so a worker will bring around his small truck and drive the visitor down one of the narrow, ribbonlike paths that wend around different sections of the large property. As its name suggests, Northwood is dotted with clumps of deciduous trees, and the green, well-tended grass looks more or less the same from one gentle rise in the ground to another. Arriving at the site for “Morrison, Rosetta Tharpe,” what one notices is a nothingness—not an ominous absence, just a patch of grass that bends quietly in the breeze that flows through the miniature cavern created by the granite stones on either side. It is like looking down at a game of hangman with all the letters filled in except for one.
A stone, a marker: these are arbitrary means of memorializing a person, of course. Especially a person like Rosetta, who in life was so unlike a stone—not cold, inert, and silent, but warm, funny, loud, playful, expressive, passionate, bawdy, and constantly in motion. To borrow a phrase from Ellis Haizlip, producer of Soul at the Center, Rosetta was a woman who unleashed cultural “vibrations so strong, so mean”—“mean” as in “oo-ooh, that girl plays a mean guitar”—that the vibrations still resonate today. Whenever a rock musician lets loose a glorious guitar solo, we’re in the living presence of those strong and mean vibrations of Rosetta Tharpe, who took the gospel blues and, using her guitar as her voice, made the bridge of a song the height of its spiritual and emotional intensity. Whenever a rock or gospel or rhythm-and-blues musician turns the amps up, we’re in the living presence of Rosetta, who made a habit of playing as loud as she could, based on the Pentecostal belief that the Lord smiled on those who made a joyful noise.
On the other hand, Rosetta’s unmarked grave is symbolic of the fragility of memory, especially our memory of those who, like Rosetta, never fit neatly into the usual boxes. Rosetta “insisted upon a sound and lifestyle of ambiguity,” says gospel scholar Horace Boyer. First there was her willingness to share her musical gift anywhere, with anyone, even in the face of disapproval from conservative corners of the Church of God in Christ. Then there was that guitar and the way she played it—like no one else in gospel. And finally there were the ways she pushed the limits, in song and in life: What did it matter if a little blues bubbled over into her gospel song? Who said she couldn’t play the fool when the fancy struck? Who cared if she enjoyed a flirtation or a drink now and then?
In a culture that tends to associate artistic greatness with a disdain for convention, such qualities of unruliness should have elevated her to the ranks of creative genius. Yet as much as this romantic version of the artist still dominates thinking about creativity, including musical creativity, it’s not part of the dominant image of the gospel musician. In popular culture especially, gospel singers are often portrayed as simple, happy people whose faith renders them ingenuous and unrefined. Occasionally they command an authority associated with their spirituality, but they’re seldom depicted as multilayered, let alone conflicted. While we’ve come to expect blues or jazz musicians to be extraordinary people leading unconventional lives, we don’t usually imagine gospel musicians in this way.
Rosetta was what music historian Rosetta Reitz calls an “underneath-it-all” performer—a kind of musical Zelig who turns up everywhere once you scratch the surface. But her fading from popular memory is not merely attributable to the natural passage of time; rather, it’s the product of a multitude of small but important acts of forgetting. In 1963, Sepia magazine inquired, “Is gospel rock and roll, or is rock and roll gospel? In the white world, people are asking this question, hoping to get a simple answer. The answer is, of course, not simple because there is so much duplication in all music. To the uninitiated, however, the rousing spirit of gospel seems to bring to mind the rousing drive of rock and roll, and since so many rock and roll singers come out of gospel, the connection seems a definite one.”1
Contrast this with a review of the 1970 American Folk, Blues and Gospel Festival in London, in which Rosetta is described as “so rhythmically exciting that when she accompanies herself on guitar she might be a blacked-up Elvis in drag.”2 Of course, the reviewer has it precisely and perversely backwards, but that doesn’t affect the breathtaking power of his misstatement, in a context in which African American women are so relentlessly and profoundly swept under the carpet of history. The same year Rosetta was described as an imitation Elvis, Jimi Hendrix died and Rosetta herself suffered the stroke that led to her eventual decline and death. Thereafter, as rock critic Kandia Crazy Horse has pointed out, the success of the British Invasion would imprint upon most people’s imaginations the image of the loud, aggressive rock guitar player as white, young, and male.
Still, the question of how Rosetta disappeared from popular memory so quickly after her death tugs at the sleeves of the imagination—and the conscience—of American music. Where are the legacies of Rosetta Tharpe? Where are the commercially successful black women rockers? Where are the women who have been able to make it as instrumentalists?
A danger behind any project to tell an “untold story” is that it will safely position its subject in the past, a collector’s item in an aficionado’s library, rather than present her as an enduring voice whose influence cannot be fully calculated, if only because it will persist into the future. Musicologist Christopher Small has noted that black performers often get pegged in the role of forebear, as though their contributions were important merely because they led to the contributions of other (usually white) musicians. Small is talking about Chuck Berry and Little Richard, but he could just as easily be referring to Rosetta herself.3
Two stories illustrate attempts to counteract this tendency. One comes from Ira Tucker Jr., who in 1998 came up with the idea of naming the Dixie Hummingbirds’ seventieth anniversary CD after Rosetta. Music in the Air—a CD that earned a Grammy nomination for Best Soul Gospel Album—“was my tribute to Sister Rosetta,” Ira Junior says, “even though it was a Hummingbirds project. I told my dad, I said look, man, I really want to call this ‘Music in the Air,’ because it’s connected, you are connected with Rosetta, and ‘Up Above My Head, I Hear Music in the Air’ was her song. And so he said, no problem, he was all for it.”
As for what Rosetta would think about trends in contemporary black women’s performance, Ira Junior says, “I’m sure if she were living today, she would be shocked. She would be shocked! I mean, because she considered herself to be a rebel. You know, I mean I’ve always thought of her as one, and I always got the feeling that she did too. She always challenged things. . . . I mean if she was to see beyond, say, today, to [Lil’ Kim], I’m sure it will flip her right out of her guitar case. . . . Sister Rosetta Tharpe paved the way for a lot of women, a lot of women. . . . She opened the doors for a lot of them and made it possible for [them] to have a career, you know, outside of the tradition.”
The second story comes from the recording of Shout, Sister, Shout!, a CD that pays tribute to Rosetta through new versions of her songs, performed primarily by women musicians. On a cold, bright Saturday morning in January 2002, Marie Knight entered a Soho studio to do “Didn’t It Rain.” Nearly fifty-four years since they had recorded it for Decca, Marie recreated the energy that characterized her collaborations with Rosetta, singing in a voice notably changed and yet qualitatively undiminished by age. Her performance began as a relatively straightforward rendition of the song, on which Rosetta sang soprano and Marie backed her up in an alto register, their voices joyfully swirling around each other. But this time Marie was soloing. Yet as people in the studio gathered to listen to the playback, a remarkable thing happened: Marie, as she listened, began punctuating her own performance with the secondary vocal line she had sung in the original recording, in effect singing the response to her own call. Hearing this, the producer urged her to reenter the studio to record her additional vocal line. She did, and then recorded yet a third track in which she added tambourine. The final product, which combines these three, is a wonderful record of musical history, reviving the voices both of Marie’s younger self and of her friend Rosetta Tharpe.
These are the sorts of acts of revival that work against forgetting, reversing the neglect of African American women’s contributions to American music. They are both, in their own small way, prayers of remembrance and gratitude. They also suggest that we have a lot of catching up with the past to do. In other words, if the name Sister Rosetta Tharpe is unfamiliar, the reason is perhaps not that Rosetta has been forgotten, but that history failed to get her in the first place. Gospel crossover star? Woman guitar sensation? Flamboyant black rocker before rock and roll? All of these formulations work, but only to a certain degree. For the rest, we’ll need to invent a new story.