What’s a preacher’s wife singing gospel music doing in a column called “Guilty Pleasures”?
Well, for starters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was technically a preacher’s ex-wife. Describing her husband, who she married in 1934 at the age of 19, as a “tyrant,” she left him four years later and moved from Chicago to New York City to start a recording career. She had been performing in public since the age of four, when she was billed as “the singing and guitar playing miracle.” As gospel, country, and R&B started to fuse into what would ultimately become known as rock and roll, Tharpe blazed a trail at the forefront of the new music, plugging in and rocking out for Jesus.
When Tharpe’s first records were released in 1938, she was immediately controversial: audiences at music clubs loved her, but religious leaders didn’t think it very seemly for a woman of God to be swinging a guitar and ripping solos on stages she shared with jazz bands and showgirls. Undaunted, Tharpe kept singing and playing, becoming the first gospel singer to break into the top ten on the R&B charts (then known as the “Harlem Hit List”). She offered entertainment and inspiration to the troops during World War II; then, after the war, joined up with singer Marie Knight — both professionally and, in what became an open secret among musicians, romantically. Even after suffering a stroke in 1970 and losing a leg to diabetes, Tharpe kept singing; she had a recording session scheduled for the day after her death, in 1973.
Tharpe has been praised and cited as an influence by musicians ranging from Elvis Presley to Aretha Franklin to Isaac Hayes. Her music can now be enjoyed so guiltlessly that she’s appeared on a postage stamp — but if you were a true believer in 1938, a Sister Rosetta Tharpe show might have been the only time you’d have felt the need to ask God’s forgiveness for singing His praises.
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