QUEER HISTORY

THE BLACK, BISEXUAL, FEMME ROOTS OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

“Black people made rock ‘n’ roll.”

Lizzo delivers this proclamation in the video for her 2019 hit “Rumors” to an animated guitar-playing woman on a vase. The statement? Historically accurate. The woman on the vase? Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Black bisexual woman who launched the rock ‘n’ roll genre.

Born in Arkansas in 1915, Tharpe was a guitar prodigy at age 4. Billed as a “singing and guitar-playing miracle,” she and her mandolin-playing missionary mother toured the South with a traveling gospel troupe. She would go on to develop her own distinctive style of playing while performing on the streets of New York, which one day caught the attention of jazz legend Cab Calloway. Without hesitation, he invited her to perform at the legendary Cotton Club.

Tharpe was an instant success, signing with Decca Records that same year. Blending Delta blues and New Orleans jazz with gospel lyrics, she created a musical style that was all her own. The record company initially struggled to fit her into a genre, ultimately marketing her music as “spirituals in swing.” One of the first commercially successful gospel recording artists, Tharpe and her musicianship was revolutionary. A female electric guitarist was practically unheard of at the time, not to mention one who was Black.

In 1944, Tharpe’s now legendary track “Strange Things Happening Every Day” was released. One of her biggest hits, it is considered to be the first rock ‘n’ roll record.

Success and fame, unfortunately, did not afford Tharpe protection from institutionalized racism. Segregation was a common practice in the 1940s, forcing Tharpe to sleep on her tour bus instead of in a hotel bed, and order food from the back entrance of a restaurant instead of dining inside.

In 1946, Tharpe attended a Mahalia Jackson concert in Harlem, where Jackson invited emerging singer Marie Knight to perform on stage. Tharpe instantly saw something special in Knight and asked her to go on the road. The two would spend the next few years touring the gospel circuit and recording hit records together.

They were also rumored to be lovers. “There was a lot of discussion about Rosetta’s attraction to men and women,” biographer Gayle Wald wrote in Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. “It was typical for people to be out, but there was no attempt for their private life to be part of their public identity.” In keeping with this, no one would go on record to talk about Tharpe’s sexuality, which didn’t surprise Wald.

“In the gospel world, it was understood that people protected each other’s privacy. You didn’t want to ruin anyone’s career or life. That way, people lived their lives as openly as they could.”

Before a concert one night in Georgia, Tharpe overheard a 14-year-old boy singing her songs outside the venue she would be performing at. She invited him, and even paid him, to open the show that evening, giving him the encouragement to become a professional performer. The young boy, Richard Wayne Penniman, would later adopt the moniker Little Richard and become one of the leading, and also queer, pioneers of early rock ‘n’ roll.

Tharpe’s popularity in the U.S. started to wane in the 1950s. The rock ‘n’ roll landscape she paved was becoming dominated by white men, but that didn’t slow her down. She set her sights on Europe, where a great blues revival was taking place. She performed a now infamous show at an abandoned railroad station in England that was broadcast nationally. Entering the venue in an elegant horse-drawn carriage, donning a luxurious white coat, Tharpe was the absolute essence of rock ‘n’ roll royalty.

On the eve of a recording session in October 1973, Sister Rosetta Tharpe passed away, from a stroke. She had been living with her mother in a humble Philadelphia home after complications from diabetes necessitated the amputation of a leg. Marie Knight did her hair and makeup for the funeral. Tharpe was laid to rest in a grave in Philadelphia that would remain unmarked for the next three decades.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in 2018, bringing overdue attention to a remarkable life that had been all but swept under the rug. Yet still, her level of recognition does not match the magnitude of her impact. How many people would guess that a queer Black woman from the South was the inspiration for every rock legend that followed her, from Little Richard to Elvis to Bob Dylan?

“Oh, these kids and rock ’n’ roll — this is just sped up rhythm and blues. I’ve been doing that forever.” — Sister Rosetta Tharpe