The first thing Decca Records heard from Sister Rosetta Tharpe was four songs cut in a single afternoon. She walked into a New York studio on the last day of October and left behind 'Rock Me', 'That's All', 'My Man and I' and 'The Lonesome Road'. The year was 1938, and the singer-guitarist was twenty-three years old. Those sides became instant hits, making Tharpe one of the first commercially successful gospel performers in America. The record label had signed a church singer, but what they got was a sound that would outrun every category they had. Sister Rosetta Tharpe died on October 9, 1973.
A childhood in the church
Tharpe had been performing since she was six, billed as Little Rosetta Nubin while traveling with her mother's evangelical troupe. Brought up in the Church of God in Christ, she was called a singing and guitar-playing miracle. That early life gave her the fire and the technique, but it also set the terms of a lifelong conflict. Gospel music belonged to the church, and the church did not approve of nightclubs. When Tharpe took her guitar into secular venues, conservative religious circles pushed back hard.
The Decca session changed what a gospel artist could be. 'Rock Me' in particular reached far beyond the faithful: it influenced rock and roll singers including Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. A music critic named Maurie Orodenker described the song in 1942 as rock-and-roll spiritual singing. That phrase, written years before rock and roll had a name, shows how early Tharpe's playing pointed toward a new music. Her guitar was not a backing instrument; it was the lead voice, sharp and swinging.
Her guitar was not a backing instrument; it was the lead voice, sharp and swinging.
A first on the Harlem Hit Parade
By the middle of the war she had another first on her hands. In 1944 Tharpe recorded 'Strange Things Happening Every Day' with pianist Sammy Price, and the song became the first gospel hit to reach the Billboard Harlem Hit Parade chart. Listeners and historians have called that record a forerunner of rock and roll, sometimes even the first rock and roll record. Tharpe was still a gospel singer, but the rhythm, the distortion and the attack of her guitar were already doing something else.
Fame came with a cost she could not ignore. In 1943 she wanted to return to strictly gospel programs, but her contract obliged her to perform secular material. The same tension followed her into her personal life. In 1951 she drew twenty-five thousand people to her wedding to her manager Russell Morrison, a spectacle that mixed ministry and show business. Tharpe kept one foot in the church and one on the stage, and neither side ever fully forgave her for it.
The road exacted a physical price. In 1970 Tharpe suffered a stroke, and complications from diabetes led to the amputation of her leg. She kept working. On the ninth of October 1973, the day before a scheduled recording session in Philadelphia, she died of a second stroke. She was fifty-eight years old. The singer who had once been a child miracle in Arkansas was buried in Northwood Cemetery in Philadelphia, a long way from the tent revivals where she started.
Recognition came slowly after her death, then all at once. In 2007 she was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, and in 2018 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named her an Early Influence. Rolling Stone ranked her the sixth greatest guitarist of all time in 2023. Two years later, Lizzo announced she would play Tharpe in a biopic for Amazon MGM Studios. Fifty-three years after her death, the woman who was once scolded for playing gospel in nightclubs is being cast as the architect of rock and roll's first spark.