Lady Shredder: The Godmother of Rock & Roll

“Can’t no man play like me,” she’d say whenever she was compared with her male peers. “I play better than a man.”

Beginning in the 1920s and for decades to follow, she came, she saw, she rocked. And then people forgot. Until recently.

The Postal Service issued a stamp with her face on it. In the state where she died, Pennsylvanians declared a day in her honor. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland finally inducted her as an “Early Influencer.”

You could be forgiven if you've never heard the name Sister Rosetta Tharpe—or if you're surprised to hear that to many, she's considered “the Godmother of Rock and Roll." Sister Rosetta might not be a household name; however, as a young woman during the 1940s through the 1960s, her recorded music and live performances played a highly significant role in the creation of rock, with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash citing her as an inspiration. As a musician, she was simply ahead of her time. Maybe even by several decades.

“She was playing rock ‘n’ roll way before anyone else,” says Lonnie Liston Smith Jr., a jazz, soul and funk musician who played with Miles Davis. “That was way before Chuck Berry and all those guys. Nobody else had even come up with something like that.”

Smith should know. His father, the late Lonnie Smith Sr., was a member of The Harmonizing Four, a popular gospel quartet that often shared billing with Tharpe.

“If anybody deserves it, she really deserves it,” he says, after being told of Tharpe’s induction into the Rock Hall. “What they call rock ‘n’ roll, she was playing it way back then. Eric Clapton, Rolling Stones, she influenced all of them.”

Born in 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Tharpe developed her distinctive style of singing and playing at age 6, when she was taken by her evangelist mother to Chicago to join Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. At 23 she left the church and moved to New York. While performing there, she was signed by Decca Records.

For the following 30 years she performed extensively to packed venues across the U.S. and Europe and recorded more than a dozen albums. Sister Rosetta died in 1973, and very little video footage exists of her today. However, what is around is not to be missed.

The Godmother of Rock N Roll:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKK_EQ4pj9A

Sources: Guitar World, Forgotten Guitar: Before Hendrix, Elvis and Chuck Berry There Was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, by Jonathan Graham (April 22, 2019; Chris Ware/Keystone Features/Getty Images (Nov. 1957); Her Gospel Truth - Sister Rosetta Tharpe invented rock ’n’ roll, but it wasn’t enough for Richmond — her chosen home for a decade — to remember her, article by Craig Belcher, Richmond Magazine (Apr. 2018); Chris Ware/Getty Images