Women Who Rock: Sister Rosetta Tharpe

By Dan Amrich

Rock history is very well documented at this point; there probably aren't too many artists that make you shake your head sand say "Who?" But Sister Rosetta Tharpe may be one of the most famous, successful, and influential artists you've never heard of.

Traveling with her evangelical preacher mother through the American south before settling in Chicago, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was deemed a child prodigy, stunning audience with her singing and guitar-playing at the tender age of 4. She was Decca Records' first gospel artist when she recorded "Rock Me" in 1938; this led to gigs at the Cotton Club and Carnegie Hall in New York City, as she crossed over into R&B, playing with big bands and ultimately electric blues. By the early 1950s, she was playing stadiums, and in the early 1960s she toured Europe with none other than Muddy Waters, giving an entire generation of British guitarists the chance to experience real American blues up close and personal.

Greats including Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, and Elvis Presley all cite her as a significant influence. She was renowned not only for her captivating energy and stage presence in live shows, but also for being one of the first guitarists to regularly employ distortion, evident on the "Up Above My Head" clip embedded above. She was often photographed playing a goldtop Les Paul with soapbar P90 pickups, but once she acquired a lightweight 1962 Gibson Les Paul Custom (a.k.a. the Gibson SG), she played it almost exclusively.

Tharpe passed away from a stroke in 1973, was honored with a U.S. postage stamp in 1998, and was finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as an Early Influencer in 2018. Yet the reason she still remains largely unknown may be the inability to categorize her music -- it spanned many genres and it seems she didn't care much for labels, anyway. “All this new stuff they call rock ’n’ roll, why, I’ve been playing that for years now," she once said. "Ninety percent of rock ’n’ roll artists came out of the church."

Check out her spirited double-stop-filled solo on "Didn't It Rain" in Manchester:

Dan Amrich started his music journalism career at Guitar World and Country Guitar magazines and is the co-creator of Princess Leia's Stolen Death Star Plans. He joined the Rocksmith team in 2014.

Still image captured from "Didn't It Rain," which is available on the American Blues-Folk Festival: The British Tours DVD. All rights reserved.