Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the biography Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trail-blazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F. Wald (©2007 by Gayle F. Wald).

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, as she was professionally billed, was not supposed to be a highlight of the fall 1938 Cotton Club revue, a fast-paced variety show headlining Cab Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers, young dancers who thrilled audiences with their acrobatic elegance. Originally, this emerging gospel singer was just a gamble, signed by Herman Stark for two weeks. Like other new attractions, Rosetta constituted one part of a huge supporting cast, performers who largely filled time between the big numbers. Early print advertisements did not mention her name.

Yet from the outset, audiences were thrilled by Rosetta’s unusual sound and style. Newspaper reporters, white and black, struggled for the right words to describe her. Most used some variation of “swing” to convey the rhythmic quality of her music, calling her a “swinger of spirituals,” a “spiritual swinging favorite,” a “hymn swinging evangelist,” and a “hymnswinger.” The Chicago Defender called her “a swingcopated manipulator of loud blue tones” and noted that “she handles the guitar rather creditably in accompaniment.”

Still others compared Rosetta to Bessie Smith, the blues singer whose career was cut short by a 1937 car accident. Like Smith, Rosetta presented a compelling picture of black female self-assurance and vigor when she performed. Indeed, her “gospel blues” and Smith’s secular blues were not all that distinct. Musically, both sprang from sources in slave culture, and both confronted the harshness of the world with determination to “make a way outta no way.” For gospel singers, this “way” was through God; for blues singers, it was through self-reliance.

From October to December 1938, events of profound and lasting significance to Rosetta’s career occurred almost weekly. Irving Mills approached Rosetta in mid-October and soon had her signed to an “exclusive publishing contract” with Mills Music. A company with an international distribution network, Mills Music quickly published Eighteen Original Negro Spirituals, an impressive booklet containing songs “with an original and appealing religious quality set down exactly as sung by Sister Tharpe since infancy in Negro churches all over the country.” Encompassing such titles as “I Look Down the Road and I Wonder,” “My Lord and I,” and “That’s All,” Eighteen Original Negro Spirituals would serve as a crucial source of Rosetta’s repertoire for the next thirty-five years.

Music publishing was important—as early gospel entrepreneurs well understood—but it didn’t have the glamour of sound recordings. Some of that glamour became Rosetta’s when she signed a contract the same month with Decca Records.

Decca had recorded songs by gospel singer Mahalia Jackson in May 1937, but they did so poorly that the label dropped her and didn’t venture back into the gospel field until it took a chance on Rosetta seventeen months later. With her bell-like voice, winning smile, and Cotton Club notoriety, Rosetta had the combination of the musical goods and showbiz flair that Mahalia had lacked. Her first records, recorded in a single session on October 31, 1938, with Rosetta accompanying herself on guitar, were instant successes. How successful they were in hard numbers is difficult to say, but successful enough to Rosetta back for a second session in January 1939 and to keep her in Decca’s employ, without interruption. until the mid-1950s.

Rosetta’s first session reveals a young woman Capable of finding and communicating the emotional core of a song through exquisite phrasing, inventive vocal technique, and guitar playing of originality, confidence, and grace. Her years of using her gift in live performance had taught her how to make a listener feel a song, not just hear it, by making use of vibrato, trills, enunciation, dynamic variety (variations in loudness), and melisma, a gospel hallmark in which the vocalist sings several notes within the space of a single syllable. Like a blues or jazz singer, Rosetta tended to sing around the beat rather than on top of it. allowing for rhythmic complexity and improvisation. Like a blues singer, too, she was capable of covering material of enormous topical and emotional variety. Her first four cuts for Decca range widely in from the sassy satire of “That’s All” to the wistful contentment of “My Man and I” to the extroverted exuberance of “Rock Me” and the longing of “The Lonesome Road.” All bore the mark of a singer-player of extraordinary control and personality.