# Sister Rosetta Tharpe *Queer Black gospel virtuoso whose electric guitar style and pop gospel performances are a core authorship of rock and roll.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: Music & Sound · Status: In review · Revised: July 21, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/sister-rosetta-tharpe ## Questions this record answers - Did Sister Rosetta Tharpe invent rock and roll guitar? - How did Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s gospel performances shape early rock and roll? - Which famous rock and roll musicians were influenced by Sister Rosetta Tharpe? - Why was Sister Rosetta Tharpe called the “Godmother of Rock and Roll”? - How did the Black church and the nightclub circuit form Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s sound? ## Summary Sister Rosetta Tharpe did not patent or formally “invent” the electric guitar, but she forged one of the decisive guitar languages of the 20th century, taking Black Pentecostal gospel rhythm, blues phrasing and a driving electric attack and turning them into a template that early rock and roll guitarists copied, extended and monetized. Long before Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry or Little Richard had national stages, Tharpe was a touring star whose amplified gospel shouts, distorted chords, and lead breaks on songs like “Rock Me,” “Strange Things Happening Every Day,” and “Up Above My Head” made her the godmother of rock and roll guitar in practice, if not in the official credits. Born Rosetta Nubin in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in 1915, Tharpe grew up in the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, where her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, was an evangelist and musician; the sanctified church’s call-and-response, rhythmic handclaps and open embrace of women instrumentalists formed her earliest training. As a child, she was already performing in church services, playing guitar and singing spirituals with a rhythmic drive that blurred the line between worship and performance. When the family moved to Chicago, she continued on the gospel circuit, becoming a prodigy of the Black Holiness-Pentecostal world that treated the guitar as both testimony and instrument of praise. In the late 1930s, Tharpe became one of gospel music’s first recording superstars, signing with Decca Records and cutting sides such as “Rock Me” in 1938 that placed traditional spiritual lyrics over jazz-inflected bands and a prominent guitar lead. She was the first major gospel performer to record for a large commercial label and one of the first to achieve national, crossover popularity, playing venues like the Cotton Club and later appearing at the Apollo Theater and on package tours that mixed sacred and secular artists. Her records and radio appearances brought a distinctly Black gospel sound—shouted vocals, backbeat-heavy rhythm sections, and searing single-note guitar lines—into mainstream American listening, collapsing the boundary between church music and popular song. Tharpe’s electric guitar work is central to her authorship. At a time when women guitarists were largely erased from the commercial record and the electric guitar itself was still new, she played with an assertive lead style that included boogie-woogie bass patterns, blues bends, jazz chording and the kind of overdriven, percussive strumming that later defined rock and roll. Contemporary observers and later music historians point to performances such as her 1964 British railway station concert—where she plays for a largely white audience of future rock stars—as direct evidence of her influence on UK and US rock guitarists who were just beginning to record. Her blend of spiritual lyrics with rhythmic intensity and showmanship, including stage moves, physical engagement with the instrument and crowd-directed call-and-response, laid down the performance grammar that many male rock frontmen later adopted and were credited for. Across the 1940s and 1950s, Tharpe experimented openly with rhythm and blues and what would soon be labeled rock and roll, cutting records that some scholars identify as among the first rock and roll sides. She collaborated with other Black artists, including gospel singer Marie Knight, and toured widely in the United States and Europe, building a transatlantic audience that included young musicians who would go on to define rock. By the time Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard were emerging, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was already a well-known figure whose recordings and live shows they could study; many of them later acknowledged her influence, even as industry structures continued to sideline her in official “inventor” narratives. Tharpe’s career also reveals the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and authorship in American music. As a Black woman whose artistry was rooted in the church but whose livelihood depended on the broader entertainment circuit, she faced criticism from religious communities for performing sacred songs in secular venues and from the broader industry for refusing to fit easily into either “gospel” or “jazz” categories. Her relationships and identity, noted in later accounts as queer or bisexual, sat uncomfortably with mid‑20th‑century respectability politics, contributing to her marginalisation in straight, male-dominated histories of rock. She suffered health setbacks later in life, including diabetes and amputation, and died in Philadelphia in 1973 after a stroke, honored by many peers but not yet fully credited for the guitar language she helped build. Since her death, Black archives, women’s history projects and music historians have worked to restore her central place in the story of modern popular music, naming her explicitly as the “Godmother of Rock and Roll” and “the original soul sister.” Her induction into institutions such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came only decades after white male artists whose sounds were indebted to hers had been canonised, but that belated recognition has not diminished the substance of her authorship. In this archive’s standing, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is one of the foundational builders of rock and roll guitar and pop gospel performance—a queer Black woman whose sanctified, electrified sound carried the Black church into global popular culture and whose riffs, shouts and showmanship remain audible in rock’s core vocabulary. ## The archive's standing The archive holds Sister Rosetta Tharpe as a foundational architect of rock and roll, not an influence at the margins. Her electrified gospel guitar, rhythmic attack and performance style are part of the core authorship of rock’s sound, carried into the mainstream through the bodies of white and Black male artists who followed her. Her stature rests on what she built: a pop gospel language and lead guitar style that made the electric instrument central to popular Black music and gave later rock and roll its feel. The record of her under-recognition—especially in comparison to the artists she influenced—is itself evidence of how race, gender and sexuality have distorted official credit, not a measure of her true contribution. This archive therefore names Tharpe as the godmother and one of the primary inventors of rock and roll guitar practice, anchoring rock’s origin story in the sanctified genius of a Black Pentecostal woman whose work preceded and made possible the later canonised figures. ## Early life, church training and Black Pentecostal roots Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born Rosetta Nubin in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in 1915, to Katie Bell Nubin, an evangelist and musician in the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ. Growing up in this Holiness-Pentecostal environment, she was immersed in a musical culture that prized rhythmic worship, improvisation and the use of guitars and other instruments as vehicles for spiritual testimony. As a child, she began performing in church services, combining strong, clear vocal projection with guitar accompaniment, and became known on the local and regional gospel circuit as a prodigy who could lift congregations with her playing. The family’s later move to Chicago placed Tharpe in one of the centers of Black religious and musical innovation, where sanctified church traditions met the city’s blues and jazz scenes. Her mother continued to lead revivals, and Tharpe’s role as both singer and guitarist deepened; here she learned not only the traditional repertoire of spirituals and hymns but also the importance of timing, dynamics and call-and-response in holding a crowd. This church foundation—Black women leading worship, guitars used as rhythmic and melodic drivers, and an ethic of performance that treated spiritual fervor and musical virtuosity as inseparable—would undergird everything she later did in commercial recording and touring. ## Recording breakthrough and pop gospel authorship Tharpe’s national breakthrough came in the late 1930s, when she signed with Decca Records and began recording gospel songs with full bands. In 1938 she cut sides including “Rock Me,” which combined overtly religious lyrics with jazz-influenced arrangements and a strong backbeat, and quickly became one of gospel’s first major recording stars. As an Arkansas biography notes, she was among the first gospel performers to record for a major label and was an early figure in bringing gospel music into secular venues and commercial circuits. Her recordings from this era established her as a creator of what would later be called pop gospel: songs that retained the spiritual content and vocal intensity of church music but were packaged, arranged and promoted for broad audiences beyond the Black religious community. This required navigating criticism from conservative church leaders who felt that sacred music should not be commodified, and from industry executives who were unsure how to categorise a Black woman whose repertoire was religious but whose sound clearly intersected with blues and jazz. Tharpe’s response was not retreat but further experimentation; she continued to fuse spiritual themes with swing rhythms, big bands and small combos, making gospel music audible as a commercial force. As her popularity grew, she played prominent stages, including New York’s Cotton Club and later Harlem’s Apollo Theater, sharing bills with jazz and blues acts and serving as both a representative of the Black church and a modern entertainer. This crossover positioned her as the first great national star of recorded gospel and as a bridge figure who carried sacred music into the secular marketplace without abandoning its emotional core. ## Electric guitar style and the building of rock and roll practice Central to Tharpe’s authorship is her electric guitar style. At a time when many guitarists were primarily accompanists, she treated the guitar as a lead voice, playing single-note solos, driving chord riffs and rhythmic figures that cut through large ensembles. Her use of early electric guitars and amplification allowed her to project in big venues and on recordings, and she developed a touch that exploited slight overdrive and percussive strumming—sonic elements that later became hallmarks of rock and roll. Music historians and journalists have described Tharpe as both the originator of pop gospel and a populariser of the electric guitar, noting that her emotionally charged, rhythmically insistent playing was foundational for rock’s emergence. Biographical accounts emphasise that she was “exceedingly skilled at playing the electric guitar,” a mastery she asserted as a Black woman in a field dominated by men. Her repertoire included pieces like “Strange Things Happening Every Day” (1944), often cited as an early rock and roll record because of its backbeat, boogie‑style piano, and prominent guitar—recorded years before rock and roll was named as a genre. On stage, Tharpe’s performance practice extended the instrument’s role beyond sound: she used body language, facial expression, and physical interaction with the guitar (bending over it, swinging it, punctuating lyrics with strums and licks) to create a visual vocabulary that rock guitarists would later adopt. Contemporary footage, including her 1964 British television performance at a railway station, shows her playing with confidence and flair for an audience of young fans and musicians, directly transmitting her style into the emerging rock scene in Britain. These performances formed an informal school of rock guitar, in which the students—many of whom would later be canonised—sat at the feet of a Black woman whose contributions were not yet being systematically recorded. ## Influence on early rock and roll and later erasure Tharpe’s impact on specific rock and roll musicians is well documented. Profiles and encyclopedic entries note that artists including Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were influenced by her sound and performance. Women’s history and music sites emphasise that figures such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton and Little Richard have cited her as an influence, underscoring her direct line into rock’s early guitar and vocal styles. She toured with younger performers, brought them into her concerts, and served as a model for how to front a band with both voice and guitar. Yet the official rock and roll narratives that solidified in mid‑century industry and media often centered white and male artists as the “inventors” of the genre, relegating Tharpe to the status of influence or curiosity. Her recordings, which predate many canonical rock records, were categorised as gospel or rhythm and blues rather than rock; institutions built around the rock canon were slow to induct her, doing so only after significant advocacy by historians and fans. An NPR retrospective describes rock and roll as having been “bred between the church and the nightclubs in the soul of a queer black woman in the 1940s named Sister Rosetta Tharpe,” explicitly naming her as the person who turned the burgeoning style into an international sensation. This framing directly counters decades of erasure. The factors behind this erasure include racism, sexism, and homophobia in the music industry and broader culture. As a Black woman whose public persona and relationships did not conform to straight, middle‑class norms, Tharpe was less likely to be presented as a respectable founding figure in mainstream histories. Her grounding in gospel also meant that some critics and chroniclers were hesitant to associate her directly with rock and roll, for fear of contaminating sacred music with secular fame. These dynamics reflect structural bias rather than any lack of artistic innovation on her part. ## Later life, death and posthumous recognition In her later years, Tharpe continued to perform, tour and record, including work in Europe that furthered her influence abroad. Health challenges, including diabetes, affected her mobility and led to the amputation of a leg, but she remained committed to her craft. In 1973 she suffered a stroke and died in Philadelphia, closing a career that had spanned more than five decades of American musical change. Posthumously, recognition of Tharpe’s role in shaping modern music has grown. She has been honored in her home state of Arkansas and by national institutions, and she is widely referred to in scholarship and popular media as the “Godmother of Rock and Roll,” “the original soul sister,” and one of the greatest women guitarists in history. Black archives, women’s history organizations and music journalists have foregrounded her queer identity and the way her life illuminates the intersections of race, gender, faith and sexuality in 20th‑century art. These efforts have begun to correct the imbalance that saw many of her students and imitators canonised while their teacher was kept at the margins. Within this archive, Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s story is held as a case study in both genius and erasure. Her artistry built core elements of rock and roll guitar and performance long before the label existed; the later reluctance to name her as an inventor speaks not to the music but to the structures that govern credit. Naming her explicitly as a primary architect of rock and roll practice is part of repairing that record and situating Black women’s sanctified brilliance at the center of American musical history. ## Sources 1. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Encyclopedia of Arkansas, entry no. 1781, Central Arkansas Library System, 2010. 2. “Sister Rosetta Tharpe,” National Women’s History Museum, education resources biography, n.d. 3. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Encyclopaedia Britannica, biography by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, latest revision c. 2024. 4. Gayle Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Beacon Press, 2007. 5. NPR Music, “Forebears: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Godmother Of Rock ’n’ Roll,” NPR, August 24, 2017. 6. Michael Corcoran, “Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock ’N’ Roll,” uDiscover Music, Universal Music Group, 2019. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/rock-and-roll - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/electric-guitar - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-gospel-music - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/little-richard - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/chuck-berry --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Sister Rosetta Tharpe," revised July 21, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/sister-rosetta-tharpe Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.