PREACHIN’ ROCK N’ ROLL

MUSICIAN | SINGER | MOTHER OF ROCK & ROLL

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, hymn-swinging, guitar-slinging evangelist, was shredding her electric guitar when Elvis Presley was a toddler. Yet it took nearly a hundred years for her to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Rosetta’s early life took shape perched atop church pianos. From the beginning, she sang and picked a guitar better than much more experienced musicians. Featuring sexy growls and high notes, her style bridged contemporary urban and backwoods rural. In church and nightclubs, she hopped between many styles of music to belt out gospel and secular tunes.

Rosetta’s personal life was a live checkerboard and she wasn’t shy about rattling conventions. Sister Rosetta married three times and had at least one female lover. Fleeing to New York City as a teen after her first bad marriage, Sister Rosetta gathered quite a following. Her lively single Strange Things Happening Every Day became the first gospel single to leap the divide between Billboard charts. It is considered by some to be the first rock song ever!

Her musical influence is obvious every time a rock musician picks up a guitar and plugs in. Sister Rosetta Tharpe accomplished so many firsts; she toured with all-white bands, traveled openly with a gay partner, blended gospel, jazz and blues into a genre all her own, and she did it long before Elvis or Little Richard.

A century later, Sister Rosetta Tharpe – female, black and queer – is accepted as the undisputed Mother of Rock & Roll.