All the elements of a guitar hero are here.īefore her, guitarists played the blues, and mostly sat down doing it, or they were part of a jazz band’s rhythm section, underpinning the soloists who stood in front.

Once you’ve read “Little Rosetta and the Talking Guitar” and “Rock, Rosetta, Rock! Roll, Rosetta, Roll!,” go to YouTube and look up “Didn’t It Rain,” the performance Tharpe gave on a rainy day in 1964 on the platform of an abandoned train station in Manchester, England, as part of Granada Television’s musical special “Blues and Gospel Train.” You will see what a seminal musician she was.

I heard her urging me to get up, to live, to go out into the world and rejoice - a lot to ask of a teenage boy. The voice was arresting insistent in a fierce but friendly way quickly recognizable to my young ears, while other voices came and went. It was years before I learned that Tharpe was playing that jangling guitar - sometimes beneath, sometimes in front of her voice. Since these introductions came by radio, I had no idea what the musicians looked like, or even whether they played the instruments accompanying them. Two decades later it introduced me not just to Tharpe, but also to the likes of Big Bill Broonzy and Woody Guthrie. This was the classical station that in 1953, in a groundbreaking program created by Mike Nichols, began playing the music of the American people. It most assuredly was coming out of our old Grundig radio, tuned, as it always was late on Saturday evenings in Chicago, to “The Midnight Special” on WFMT. The first time I heard Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s voice must have been when I was in high school in the 1970s.

Little heaven book review