#rosetta reitz

[melaninherstory]

Performers of the "Blues Is a Woman" concert at the Newport Jazz Festival at Avery Fisher Hall: (standing, l to r), Koko Taylor, Linda Hopkins, producer George Wein, Rosetta Reitz, Adelaide Hall, Little Brother Montgomery, Big Mama Thornton, Beulah Bryant; (seated, l to r), Sharon Freeman, Sippie Wallace, Nell Carter (copyright Barbara Weinberg Barefield)

[blackrockandrollmusic-blog]

More than any other twentieth-century black vernacular music, gospel is the forgotten root of rock ‘n’ roll. If blues and boogie-woogie are rock 'n' roll's acknowledged progenitors, then gospel is its midwife: the figure that assisted at the birth but isn't remembered as having been central to the creation process. Yet rock 'n' roll sounds and sensibilities are thoroughly enmeshed with the sounds and sensibilities of the "good news" music that developed in and from African American working-class Pentecostal churches in the 1930s. "All rock's most resilient features, the beat, the drama, the group vibrations derive from gospel," writes Anthony Heilbut in The Gospel Sound, a celebratory chronicle of gospel music published in 1971, at the height of rock's dominance as youth music for a new generation. "The gospel sound is everywhere." Everywhere, that is, except in official musical memory. The reasons for this absence vary, although they stem largely from gospel's origins in African American Christian communities. The ritual function of gospel as religious music puts it at odds, for example, with quintessential rock 'n' roll rebel narratives of the sort embraced both in the popular imagination (where the rituals of youth are conceived in opposition to the rituals of the church) and in contemporary scholarship on popular music. The characteristic tensions of these narratives—between authenticity and the market, art and commercial incorporation—are present in gospel and yet play themselves out quite differently in a context in which religious values and interests are often pitted against those of secular mass culture. Historically, gospel artists who have "crossed over" (the term itself is indicative of these tensions, and of the ways that influence has been imagined unilaterally) have been viewed with wariness for making the sounds of African American worship—sounds produced within a sphere of racial intimacy—available as "popular" music. Technologies of mass reproduction such as radio and recorded sound, which enabled music to travel through time and space and to be both owned and collected as artifact, therefore had poignant meaning for gospel's largely poor, largely female audience. The composition of gospel's audience connects back to the notion of gospel as midwife. In part because of women's predominance in African American churches, gospel is unique among U.S. popular music idioms for offering female musicians creative opportunities to develop their talents. The Pentecostal churches where gospel flourished overwhelmingly invested men with institutional power, in particular barring women from preaching. But they afforded women a variety of leadership roles as musicians: most commonly as choir directors, church organists and pianists, and soloists. Although Thomas A. Dorsey, the blues pianist turned prolific Christian composer and entrepreneur, is thus typically elevated as the "Father of Gospel," the music's most celebrated and culturally representative artists have long been women. Even people who know little of gospel recognize the names of singers such as Marion Williams and Mahalia Jackson. This "gendering" of gospel leads jazz historian Rosetta Reitz to position African American women at the center of U.S. popular music history. "It was," she asserts, "the women swinging the congregations from the keyboards, the soloists, the choirs, and the worshippers hallelujahing, that are the base—the underneath it all-- of America's music. Reitz's inspiration for this wonderfully provocative claim was one of these underneath-it-all women: "Sister" Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973), gospel's first national star and its preeminent crossover musician from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s. At a time when women seldom commanded commercial attention as instrumentalists, and when prevailing notions of female sexual propriety strictly limited the sphere of their acceptable behavior as performers, Tharpe distinguished herself for her dynamic guitar playing and charismatic stage presence— the stage in question alternately consisting of nightclubs, church pulpits, and local auditoriums. Rather than simply catering to commercial tastes, moreover, Tharpe made music that existed at the threshold of sacred and secular: up-tempo arrangements of songs like "Strange Things Happening Every Day," "Up Above My Head," and "Didn't It Rain" (the latter recorded with her long-time singing partner "Madame" Marie Knight) that reinterpreted African American gospel idioms for popular audiences in an era of swing's commercial dominance. Gayle Wald, Sister Rosetta Tharpe & The Prehistory of "Women in Rock"

[victorfranko]

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Bertha Idaho - You've Got the Right Eye, But You're Peeping in the Wrong Keyhole

Super Sisters: Independent Women’s Blues Vol. 3

Another track from the great Rosetta Records compilation.

Many of the ladies on this album are so obscure I can't find any pictures or biographical information.  Case in point, Bertha Idaho... she recorded four (4) songs between 1928 and 1929 and then fell off the face of the earth.