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Sister Rosetta Tharpe – Phantom Dancer 13 Oct 2020
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, big band and gospel singer, is this week’s Phantom Dancer feature artist. You’ll hear her with Lucky Millinder’s Orchestra from records and radio broadcasts.Greg Poppleton brings you The Phantom Dancer, your non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV. On-air every week since 1985.Hear The Phantom Dancer online from 12:04pm AEST Tuesday 6 October at https://2ser.com/phantom-dancer/ where you can also hear two years of archived shows.The finyl hour is vinyl.
SISTER
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a musical prodigy who began singing and playing the guitar as Little Rosetta Nubin at the age of four.By age six, in 1921, Tharpe had joined her mother as a regular performer in a traveling evangelical troupe. Billed as a “singing and guitar playing miracle,” she accompanied her mother in performances that were part sermon and part gospel concert before audiences across the American South. In the mid-1920s, Tharpe and her mother settled in Chicago, Illinois, where they performed religious concerts at the Roberts Temple COGIC, occasionally traveling to perform at church conventions throughout the country. Tharpe developed considerable fame as a musical prodigy, standing out in an era when prominent black female guitarists were rare. In 1934, at age 19, she married Thomas Thorpe, a COGIC preacher, who accompanied her and her mother on many of their tours. The marriage lasted only a few years, but she decided to adopt a version of her husband’s surname as her stage name, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
ROSETTA
In 1938, she left her husband and moved with her mother to New York City. Although she married several times, she performed as Rosetta Tharpe for the rest of her life.On October 31, 1938, aged 23, Tharpe recorded for the first time – four sides for Decca Records backed by Lucky Millinder‘s jazz orchestra. The first gospel songs recorded by Decca, “Rock Me”, “That’s All“, “My Man and I” and “The Lonesome Road” were instant hits, establishing Tharpe as an overnight sensation and one of the first commercially successful gospel recording artists.She had signed a seven-year contract with Millinder. Her records caused an immediate furor: many churchgoers were shocked by the mixture of gospel-based lyrics and secular-sounding music, but secular audiences loved them. Tharpe played on several occasions with the white singing group the Jordanaires.Tharpe’s appearances with Cab Calloway at Harlem‘s Cotton Club in October 1938 and in John Hammond‘s “Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall on December 23, 1938, gained her more fame, along with notoriety. Performing gospel music for secular nightclub audiences and alongside blues and jazz musicians and dancers was unusual, and in conservative religious circles a woman playing the guitar in such settings was frowned upon. Tharpe fell out of favor with segments of the gospel community.
THARPE
By 1943 she considered rebuilding a strictly gospel act, but she was contractually required to perform more worldly material. Her nightclub performances, in which she would sometimes sing gospel songs amid scantily clad showgirls, caused her to be shunned by some in the gospel community.Tharpe continued recording during World War II, one of only two gospel artists able to record V-discs for troops overseas.Her song “Strange Things Happening Every Day“, recorded in 1944 with Sammy Price, Decca’s house boogie woogie pianist, was the first gospel song to appear on the Billboard magazine Harlem Hit Parade.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj3fpujjFis
13 OCTOBER PLAY LIST
Play List – The Phantom Dancer
107.3 2SER-FM Sydney, Live Stream Community Radio Network Show CRN #434
