Did you know that Sister Rosetta Tharpe would have celebrated her 100th birthday last Friday?
For the uneducated, Rosetta Tharpe is the Grandmother of Rock ‘n Roll, and due to her birthday ticking-over to a triple digits, many are discussing her lasting impact on music, arguing that she is the originator of rock ‘n roll, as Fusion (via A Journal of Music Things) writes.
Tharpe, born twenty years before Elvis and a decade before Chuck Berry (two artists cited as the pioneers of rock ‘n roll) recorded the likes 1939’s ‘This Train’, ‘Down By The Riverside’ of ’44 and 1945’s ‘Strange Things Happening Everyday’, all years before Elvis, Berry and Little Richard begun stirring the rock ‘n roll pot in the 1950s, these recordings founding arguments that she is in fact the first rock ‘n roll artist.
An excerpt from the Fusion article speaks of Tharpe as an originating force, “She had a major impact on artists like Elvis Presley,” her biographer Gayle Wald told a documentary film crew. “When you see Elvis Presley singing songs early in his career, I think you [should] imagine, he is channeling Rosetta Tharpe. It’s not an image that I think we’re used to thinking of in rock and roll history. We don’t think about the black woman behind the young white man.”
Naturally, there are many that argue that Tharpe – although utterly brilliant and an incredibly influential musician (especially for women) pertains to a more R&B and blues sound, not rock ‘n roll.
Check out the full, interesting piece detailing Tharpe’s strong legacy at Fusion, but before you do – here’s an absolute killer video of Rosetta Tharpe shredding at a Manchester train station in 1964, we know you’re gonna dig it:
