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Instead of posting a list of the same song by various players, today, I’m paying homage to a single musician and a single of genre of music
Another side of Our Blues roots is often overlooked is the influence of black gospel. I recently came across Sister Rosetta Tharpe who was one of the most amazing performers ever. One of the greatest voices that I’ve heard in any genre of music and she played guitar in a style similar to T Bone Walker
I’ve included part 1 of a documentary on her and it reveals that Elvis was a big fan of Sister Rosetta and you can hear her influence in his singing
Hope you guys like this – to me, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was nothing short of amazing – both as a singer and a guitar player (get the impression that I like her??)
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Thank you, Keith!
I’m not generally interested in gospel, so I wasn’t thrilled when I saw the subject line (even though the older I get the better vocal-based groups sound, so doo-wop and gospel are sounding better than they ever have). But YES, Sister Rosetta Tharpe played some of the swingingest, coolest music around, so I hope no one else is so put off by the title they miss Sister Rosetta. What she plays is rock ‘n’ roll by another name.
And blues. Although it didn’t make the transition to rock ‘n’ roll or rock, “Trouble In Mind” was covered by dozens, maybe hundreds, of blues singers. This song and the three you posted above were filmed at the great American Folk Blues Festival in Europe in the early ’60s.
Don D.
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I was totally amazed with Sister Rosetta overall as a performer
IF you stop and think – when the slaves were freed, some played blues and some played/sang spirituals. When you examine the 2 forms of music, they are almost identical
In the fields, they would sing songs to pass the day and to encourage themselves.Most of the spiritual can be played on the black keys of a keyboard and if I’m not mistaken, that is the pentatonic scale.
If you listen to some of the modern gospel singers, the musicianship is top notch
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I’m not at all satisfied with my answer here because I just don’t know enough about the genre.
There wasn’t a line drawn between the two types of music (blues and gospel) in the minds of the people who sang and played it during the times of slavery and immediately after (blues didn’t even begin to be recognized as a separate branch of music until late in the 1800s), many people played a variety of both what might be considered sacred and what would be considered secular. The particulars are interesting and complicated, more than I can go into off the top off my head (I haven’t read about the history of spirituals and gospel except where they’ve been part of something else because they don’t generally move me). Last July, Brian posted something in his blog about Howard Carroll, the gittarist for the Dixie Hummingbirds. I was impressed with that but didn’t take it any further.
It was some of the preachers with an ax to grind who labeled the blues (and then rock ‘n’ roll) “the devil’s music” and tried to keep “the faithful” from it (I think this began in the 1920s). When I was a kid, I took offense at that, it may have put me off of the music along with the message.
I agree about the high quality of a lot of contemporary gospel, just isn’t my thing–but a whole lot of the music that I do like makes at least a passing reference to spiritual things.
Don D.
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