In short
Episode topic: Beverly Knight discusses Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “godmother of rock and roll,” focusing on her gospel-to-secular crossover, faith conflicts, and impact on later rock guitar and vocal styles.
Guests and backgrounds
Beverly Knight is a singer-songwriter, award-winning actress, and campaigner. Jo Boyd is a legendary music producer/writer who was tour manager for the 1964 Blues and Gospel Caravan to Britain.
Key claims
Tharpe was a founding figure of rock and roll; her high, powerful, sass-filled soprano and electrified guitar helped bridge gospel and commercial music decades before Ray Charles. She bucked Church of God in Christ norms by using amps, changing lyrics, and performing secular-leaning material, yet never lost her faith. Her early death (stroke 1970, leg loss to diabetes, second stroke 1973) limited her later recognition.
Notable examples
“This Train Is a Clean Train” and “Didn’t It Rain”; the 1964 Manchester railway-station performance; Carnegie Hall’s “Spirituals to Swing” benefit; endorsements/imitations by Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan, Little Richard, and Dionne Warwick; her duet partnership with Marie Knight; the 1950 fire that killed Marie’s children and mother; and Tharpe’s “squirrels” nickname for husbands who saved money.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Influence of Sister Rosetta Tharpe
1:34 to 2:02
Discover why Sister Rosetta Tharpe is vital to music history.
“I have picked the wonderful Sister Rosetta Tharp, a name which perhaps is not commonly dropped in conversations about music greats, but she should be.”
Sister Rosetta's Music and Impact
2:02 to 3:06
Explore the distinct musical style and personal background of Sister Rosetta.
“She was born in 1915, Cotton Plant, Arkansas, the Deep South.”
Beverly's Musical Roots
3:06 to 3:39
Learn about Beverly Knight's background in music and her church upbringing.
“She was a Pentecostal and she was a member of the Church of God in Christ.”
Legacy of Sister Rosetta Tharpe
3:39 to 4:12
Understand the profound impact Sister Rosetta had on other musicians.
“My mum says that I came out the womb singing.”
Jo Boyd's Memories of Sister Rosetta
4:12 to 5:48
Hear firsthand accounts about Sister Rosetta from producer Jo Boyd.
“Then there's Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan, Little Richard.”
Touring with Sister Rosetta
5:48 to 8:17
Discover Jo Boyd's experiences while on tour with Sister Rosetta.
“I just get the impression of her, well, this train, she's like a steam train of a woman.”
Sister Rosetta's Influence and Loss
8:17 to 11:40
Discuss Sister Rosetta's influence and the effect of her early death on her legacy.
“She had a very expensive red wig that she wore.”
Sister Rosetta's Evolution in Music
11:40 to 13:44
Learn about Sister Rosetta's transition from gospel to broader music themes.
“And so you could imagine that if she had lived, she would have...”
Controversy with the Church
13:44 to 14:00
Examine the challenges Sister Rosetta faced with the church regarding her music.
“What do you know about this change in her life, either of you?”
Sister Rosetta's Philosophy on Music
14:00 to 16:49
Explore Sister Rosetta Tharpe's unique approach to gospel music and her relationship with the church.
“She had a chance to reach a wide audience and sing gospel.”
Show all 16 chapters
Pioneering Spirit and Historical Performances
16:50 to 18:18
Understand Sister Rosetta's influence on rock and roll and her significant performances.
“And Rosetta was doing it 15 years earlier.”
The Musical Partnership and Personal Struggles
18:19 to 21:04
Delve into Rosetta's partnership with Marie Knight and the impact of personal tragedy.
“Tell me, Beverly, a bit more about Marie Knight.”
Relationships and Societal Commentary
21:05 to 23:40
Discuss Rosetta's relationships and her commentary on churchgoers and societal norms.
“she had three marriages we won't go into the details of all of them but were any of her marriages happy?”
Legacy and Later Years
23:41 to 26:38
Examine Sister Rosetta's later years and her legacy in music and beyond.
“You all say that you're behaving in this wonderful Christian way and your laws are written on Christian tenants.”
Finding Joy Beyond Music
26:39 to 28:00
Reflect on Rosetta's happiness in her personal life and her enduring legacy.
“I mean, one of the sadnesses of my life, you know, is that I thought this tour was unbelievable.”
Characterization of Sister Rosetta Tharpe
28:00 to 28:20
Learn about the joyful portrayal of Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the program.
“especially when they were younger, have said it was very much an open secret.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Beverley Knight:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
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1:17Beverley Knight:Today's guest is a singer, songwriter, award-winning actress and a campaigner. She also has a beautiful voice, and that possibly influences her choice of a great life. Beverly Knight, welcome to our series. Tell us, whom have you picked and why?
1:36Gayle Wald:I have picked the wonderful Sister Rosetta Tharp, a name which perhaps is not commonly dropped in conversations about music greats, but she should be. because she is, for me, on Mount Rushmore of the founding people of rock and roll. She deserves her place, the godmother.
2:00Beverley Knight:Why haven't we heard more about her?
2:02Gayle Wald:It's the time in which she lived. She was born in 1915, Cotton Plant, Arkansas, the Deep South. Her story was not deemed as being significant, important, but of course it is.
2:16Beverley Knight:Well, yeah, you're going to make it for us. Oh, yes. Describe her music. I've seen her picking up the guitar. Wonderful. But what did she sound like? Can you encapsulate the kind of voice she had?
2:28Gayle Wald:She was a dynamic and vibrant soprano voice. She became a bigger woman when she started out in her 20s, very young. She was slim, but life on the road. And then she became quite heavy set. But still, it never stopped her dynamism. Her voice was, yeah, it was high and it was powerful. And it had a lot of sass and a lot of attitude to it.
2:55Beverley Knight:Why Sister Rosetta?
2:56Gayle Wald:She was a woman of faith. She was a maverick who bucked against what the church deemed to be acceptable music. And she went into the secular world. She was a Pentecostal and she was a member of the Church of God in Christ. Big, big, powerful black church. And she was known as Sister Rosetta. Well, Sister Beverly, let's hear her sing. This train is a clean train, this train. I said this train is a clean train, yes, this train.
3:31Beverley Knight:This train is a famous gospel song. It's fantastic.
3:36Gayle Wald:Everybody write it in his name.
3:38Beverley Knight:Growing up, did you sing in church?
3:41Gayle Wald:I did. My mum says that I came out the womb singing. Because I was perhaps not even three years of age yet. But I could sing and I knew melody and I would gravitate towards anything and everything musical. And we all belong to a Pentecostal church. So it was as natural as breathing is.
4:04Beverley Knight:Johnny Cash said she was his favourite singer. Chuck Berry reckoned his career had been one long Sister Rosetta Tharp impersonation. Then there's Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan, Little Richard. All of them said they owed her a debt. In fact, here, very briefly, is Little Richard. Sister Rosetta Thorpe, we do that, Woo-hoo-hoo! Woo-hoo! That high holler and sour, imitate that holler. That was very short. Can we hear it again? Woo-hoo-hoo! Woo-hoo!
4:33Joe Boyd:That high holler and sour, imitate that holler.
4:37Beverley Knight:Oh, wow. And here, a few years later, is Dionne Warwick.
4:41Gayle Wald:I was privileged to hear and see Sister Rosetta Thorpe at my church. What was really the most astonishing thing, because I was quite young, was to see her play that guitar. Of course, you see a lot of men playing guitars, but she handled that instrument like nobody I'd ever heard before.
5:03Beverley Knight:And you've played her on stage. Tell us about that.
5:06Gayle Wald:Joy, absolute joy. The play Marie and Rosetta is about the relationship that she had with her singing partner and, at least privately, her life partner at one stage in both their lives, Marie Knight.
5:24Beverley Knight:Yeah.
5:24Gayle Wald:We reveal their lives, their loves, their challenges, and, of course, the great music. And that is what really speaks to me.
5:33Beverley Knight:In a moment, we're going to hear about Sister Rosetta's early life, both in the church and later on tour. First, though, the producer has found someone who saw her play live, the legendary music producer and writer, Jo Boyd. Jo, we've been talking about how she looked, watching clips on YouTube. I just get the impression of her, well, this train, she's like a steam train of a woman. You've seen her, you've met her.
5:59Joe Boyd:I not only saw her, I worked with her. I was the tour manager on the Blues and Gospel Caravan that came to Britain in 1964. And many people in Britain saw on television. We did a concert at a railway station in Manchester on a rainy night. Sister Rosetta stood there on the platform with an audience of young Mancunians, and she sang, Didn't It Rain? Oh, my Lord, Didn't It Rain? And it brought the house down. And that clip lives forever. People remember it really vividly as a key moment. A lot of musicians say they saw Muddy Waters that night and Sister Rosetta that night. And it really had an influence.
6:42Joe Boyd:Because in 1964, Britain was kind of obsessed with African-American music. They loved Muddy Waters. They loved Howling Wolf. They loved Chuck Berry. all these groups were forming of white art students singing Mississippi blues, you know. In America, nobody was paying attention. I had loved, I'd heard Sister Rosetta's records. My brother and I collected old 78s. We had some Rosetta shellacks, you know, from about the late 50s, 57, 58. And we loved, you know, Don't Take Everybody to Be Your Friend and Strange Things Happening Every Day. And so I was completely thrilled to know that Krista Rosetta was coming on this tour.
7:29Joe Boyd:And she was just fantastic. She came with her so-called manager stroke husband, Russell, who was a real boring stick and tweeds who sat there, didn't say much and frowned a lot. But Rosetta was the life of the party. She was, you know, joyful and absolutely killed every audience. and showed off her guitar chops fantastically.
7:55Beverley Knight:She seems to connect very easily, naturally, quickly with white people. What impact did she make on you? You were a very young man at that time.
8:06Joe Boyd:Well, I look back on, I've done a lot of interesting things in my life, but I sometimes think that tour was the peak. Everything else has been slightly downhill since then. She was a very sophisticated woman. She had a very expensive red wig that she wore. She had very nice high-heeled shoes. She had a fur coat. She'd toured France. She'd been to Britain before and toured with Chris Barber. She had an air of sophistication that she flaunted. The first morning that we were at the Strand Palace Hotel, we all came down to breakfast, and she sat at a table with Russell and Reverend Gary Davis, who was a street gospel singer from Harlem, who was also a great guitar player, blind and country as she used to say and he used to wear very rumpled clothes and that first morning he was served his egg and he felt on the plate to see where the egg was and he picked it up with his fingers held it over his open mouth tilted his head back and dropped the egg into his mouth with yolk running down his chin onto his shirt and Rosetta was horrified She looked at me like, do I have to tour with this unsophisticated, dirty old man?
9:24You know, it's like, what are we doing here?
9:27Joe Boyd:You know, and she immediately like avoided Gary. Yeah. End of the tour, the last night at Brighton, she told me, she said, Gary Davis is the deepest man I've ever met. Oh, yeah. And he used to sing Precious Lord, that famous hymn of Thomas Dorsey. Thomas Dorsey, yeah. He did a great, very rough, rustic version of it. And she came to me, she said, give me a microphone, but offstage, a long chord. I don't want to take anything away from Gary. And when he started to sing it, she stood in the wings with her microphone and she moaned, just like back in the church in Arkansas. I don't think I've ever had a more electrifying musical moment.
10:11Joe Boyd:Stunned me.
10:12Beverley Knight:You're looking transfixed. I am. Have you any questions for Jo?
10:17Gayle Wald:I'm really interested in the woman off camera. So that's why I was listening so intently to that story, because obviously that's a moment that is candid and that nobody would ever have captured. Was she as carefree? Because that's how she appears to me the more I've read about her. She seemed to be really gregarious and really, you know.
10:41Joe Boyd:She was. She was flamboyant. she was sort of kind of over-the-top character.
10:46Beverley Knight:She looks as if she's just loving every moment.
10:49Joe Boyd:Yeah, and you can see in that clip from Manchester the way she gets the crowd to sing, you know, didn't it rain? And I think in answer to one of the questions you asked before about why she didn't have the resonance with the rock history buffs, you know, that she should have, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact she died too soon, You know, that in a way that the 60s, there was this explosion of rock music and America slowly woke up to where this all came from, the way the Brits had earlier. And Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker and B.B. King and all these people had long careers in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s.
11:34Joe Boyd:And Rosetta died too soon. You know, she lost her leg, I think, in the early 70s.
11:38Gayle Wald:She lost her leg, yeah.
11:40Joe Boyd:And she couldn't really tour. And so you could imagine that if she had lived, she would have... Montreja's festival. Yeah, exactly. And this moment history became commodified, she would have benefited from that.
11:55Beverley Knight:Now, let's get back to the beginning of her life, which we've rather skipped over. From what I've read, she was born in 1915 to a huge family in a small town called Cotton Plant, Arkansas. You mentioned that. Here from a Radio 2 documentary, Shout Sister Shout, is Sister Rosetta's biographer, Gail Wold. Cotton Plant was a racially segregated, small southern town. The name implies that the primary agricultural product there was cotton. Rosetta Tharp's father was a singer and musician, and he had a voice that would carry over a cotton field. Rosetta Tharp's mother played the mandolin and also probably played some piano.
Read the full transcript
12:40Beverley Knight:So Rosetta Tharp learned on the lap of her mother playing in church and she was known early on for having a gift and in her world that gift was understood as God-given and that's pretty much how she got her start. How about you, Beverly? How did you get your start?
12:57Gayle Wald:My earliest memory of performance, I must have been about age four and I went up on the pulpit and joined my mum singing.
13:08Beverley Knight:From what I've heard, Katie Bell Newbin, that's her mother, took Rosetta north to Chicago, one of the millions who migrated there after the First World War. Her mother conducted outdoor services in the market area while little Rosetta played guitar. Later on, they went on to the evangelising tent circuit, reached Miami and Rosetta married a preacher, Tommy Thorpe, or Tharp, who gave her the surname she kept for the rest of her life. Sometime after this, she began singing songs that weren't strictly gospel. What do you know about this change in her life, either of you? You know, she was ambitious and she got an offer from Lucky Millinder,
13:53Joe Boyd:who had a big band, you know, to join and he could see how commercial she was, what a great star she could be. So he said, come sing gospel with us. And so they did big band arrangements. She had a chance to reach a wide audience and sing gospel.
14:10Gayle Wald:I think that was the appeal. In our play, Marie and Rosetta, there's a little line that Rosetta says to Marie in explaining her philosophy. She says, I brought a little club into the church and a little church into the club. She explicitly was saying, well, you're not going to find the sinners to convert sitting in church on Sunday morning. There, that's preaching to the converted.
14:40Beverley Knight:But she got into trouble with the church for it. She did. An example here, lyrics, the gospel lyrics, Jesus, hear me praying, hear the words I'm saying, changed to won't you hear me swinging, hear the words I'm singing. You can understand why the church was a little bit troubled by that.
14:56Gayle Wald:The church were troubled, but the church were troubled by, and I know this from experience, by anything that did not fit to their very, very narrow and constricted view of what music should be. The very idea that this woman is picking up a guitar, plugging it in to an amp, so when she strikes a power chord, it's going to reverberate around the building, was absolutely of the devil to these people. They didn't appreciate, and again, we say in the show, no matter how you play them, these notes are all going to the same place. Some are just getting there with a little more style.
15:39Beverley Knight:That was the point.
15:41Gayle Wald:And I'm with her 100%. The church just didn't understand that. Now, when she went on and performed with people like Lucky Melinda, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and people like that, doing things on stage that perhaps she did feel uncomfortable about. That I understood why the church would be concerned. She found herself putting on blackface and there was a whole saint and sinners act that she was a part of. But just in terms of changing the lyrics to bring in a broader amount of people to then hear the word of God, to me is a great thing and a positive thing. and that's what Sister Rosetta was trying to do.
16:23Gayle Wald:The church just didn't see it that way.
16:25Beverley Knight:And her career, though, was really taking off. She'd signed to Decca Records, moved to New York, played at the Cotton Club to white audiences now, not church audiences, and she was performing at Carnegie Hall too.
16:39Joe Boyd:Well, that Carnegie Hall concert is historic. That was called Spirituals to Swing and it was a benefit concert to raise money for the Spanish Republic in the Civil War and was organized by John Hammond. But I think the point about gospel and the crossover between gospel and commercial music is she's such a pioneer, because in a way, the rock and roll revolution, according to historians, began with Ray Charles singing secular lyrics to gospel music. And Rosetta was doing it 15 years earlier. I challenge anybody, listen to a track of Rosetta and then listen to a track of Chuck Berry and listen to the guitar playing.
17:24Joe Boyd:It's the same, you know, it's absolutely the same style.
17:28Gayle Wald:Very much the same kind of cadence. Exactly.
17:31Joe Boyd:And he says, I learned it from her. A true pioneer.
17:35Beverley Knight:You're listening to The Great Life of Sister Rosetta Tharp, chosen by my guest, Beverly Knight. Let's hear again from her biographer, Gail Wald.
17:50Joe Boyd:By the middle 40s, Rosetta was recording songs with the wonderful Marie Knight as her vocal foil and duet partner. Those two singing together, Marie Knight had a quality that I think is reminiscent of Mahalia Jackson's voice, where she has this gravitas to her singing, and then around that you have both the guitar playing and the vocal acrobatics of Rosetta Tharp.
18:17Gayle Wald:I said it rained, you know it rained
18:19Beverley Knight:Tell me, Beverly, a bit more about Marie Knight.
18:23Gayle Wald:She was originally in a gospel quartet and they audaciously took on the South, playing in all the churches and their relationship was a beautiful one on stage, you know, to witness. I mean, we just heard Didn't It Rain? Marie with that kind of more resonant alto sound and Rosetta floating on the top with her guitar dancing around. Yeah, Marie had such a tragic incident that kind of put paid to their relationship. I think it was, and Joe, you might want to correct me, I think in 1950, and there was a fire that took the lives of both Marie's children and her mother, and it broke Marie completely, and she felt that she just needed to withdraw.
19:13Gayle Wald:And then she had a second wind where she came back into prominence as a gospel singing preacher. She helped Rosetta to find favour again. Yes. With Church of God in Christ, who were so upset with her.
19:33Beverley Knight:So though she'd lost her reputation amongst some churchgoers, she hadn't lost her faith.
19:39Gayle Wald:Rosetta never lost her faith. right to the end, she had that faith. And yet she maybe sang some of the more flirty, as she called them, songs four or five times and tall skinny popper and these kind of songs. She was reminiscent of someone like Marvin Gaye, who we understand wrestled with very deeply held reverence for God, but also sang sexual healing, for example. So Rosetta went through all those things that we are now much more familiar with. She just did it decades before.
20:16Beverley Knight:She called her husbands the squirrels. Do either of you know? Yes. Why? Because they were squirrelling away our money for a rainy day.
20:27Gayle Wald:Yeah.
20:28Joe Boyd:You were asking earlier, Beverly, about Rosetta's way of speaking on stage. And I remember talking to her once about, as a child, touring with her mother. By the time they got to Chicago or by the time Rosetta started going out on her own, which was like when she was 17 or 18 or something like that, I said something like, what was life like? What was, you know, and she said, honey, by that time, I had my boots laced on up to my hips. I love her
21:03Beverley Knight:we're talking about her marriages she had three marriages we won't go into the details of all of them but were any of her marriages happy? I don't think they were
21:14Gayle Wald:squirrel number three certainly not I mean she stuck that one out she stuck it out he hung in there I think that's a better way of putting it for 22 years and that marriage was so successful that upon her death, he didn't even buy a gravestone for her.
21:33Beverley Knight:What a squirrel.
21:34Gayle Wald:He was a squirrel. He squirreled that money away. I don't think it's disrespectful or incorrect for me to say that he mismanaged her money pretty much from the jump. And that wedding, and this is an important point, to the third husband was actually the first rock and roll arena, you know, stadium gig.
22:00Beverley Knight:They got married in the stadium.
22:01Gayle Wald:They got married in a baseball stadium. And 20 ,000 plus people came to see this great phenomenon of a woman perform back then for a woman with a guitar, black. No. And yeah, they got married. Yeah, they stuck it out. Rather a lot of witnesses.
22:21Beverley Knight:Lots of witnesses.
22:22Gayle Wald:and right to the very end when she passed in 1973.
22:26Beverley Knight:Oh, we hear church people say They are in this holy way There are strange things Happening every day
22:37Gayle Wald:Oh, we hear church people say That they're in the holy way There are strange things Happening every day That line, I mean, oh, we hear church people say that they're in the holy way. I think that's a commentary on the perceived piousness of a lot of churchgoers who the perception is not the reality. And she goes on and says, you know, if you want to view the climb, you must learn to quit your lying. I think she was throwing darts at the very people who were throwing darts at her for venturing outside of God's fold and outside of the sanctified music. I think she was saying, no, look at your lives.
23:25Gayle Wald:You guys, you know, go to church on Sunday and then do some all kinds of craziness on Monday. And I think that, broadly speaking, and Joe, you know, again, tell me if I'm wrong, could be said to the wider American community, you guys are demonising us black folks. Well, I'm holding a mirror to you guys. Look at you. You all say that you're behaving in this wonderful Christian way and your laws are written on Christian tenants. But is anything that you're doing Christian, you know?
24:01Beverley Knight:We heard earlier from you, Jo Boyd, about her arrival in Britain, along with Muddy Waters and others on that influential tour, but it wasn't the first time she came here. As you said, Chris Barber had invited her over six years before. The real importance, though, of the 1964 tour, which went to Bristol and Leicester, Southampton and Sheffield, was that it was televised by Granada. Well, it's strange to look back at that event,
24:28Joe Boyd:because at the time we were a bit bemused. We were playing these wonderful big concert halls and they were almost all completely filled. Muddy Waters was still playing a little club on the south side of Chicago. Brian McGee was playing little coffee shops. And suddenly we were playing these big halls. And now, of course, it's historic. People revere it and talk about seeing it and how great it was and how influential. I think also you looked at the audience, you had all these great British blues legends and rock stars, Brian Jones and Clapton and Jeff Beck.
25:09Gayle Wald:These guys came to see the real thing. And these future rock gods sat there enthralled like, oh, my God, this is the best thing I've ever seen in my life.
25:17Beverley Knight:Roughly how old would she have been at this point?
25:21Gayle Wald:Middle age, but still had all the vitality in that.
25:24Beverley Knight:Yeah.
25:24Gayle Wald:But none of us knew that she would only have another ten years left.
25:30Beverley Knight:The end of her life seems sad. She had a stroke in 1970, then she lost her leg to diabetes and finally died of a second stroke in 1973. Her husband, you say, wanting to save money, buried her in an unmarked grave. When did she start to return to public recognition, Joe?
25:52Joe Boyd:Well, she never really was totally out of it. I think that her stardom was from the late 30s to the mid to late 40s. And then there was a decline in big bands. She didn't have Lucky Millinder to travel with. And the gospel world was sort of changing. Mahalia and the quartets were the big stars of the 50s. I think she struggled. I mean, she was looking for openings around that. And I think Chris Barber first and the French who invited her to France.
26:25Gayle Wald:I have to just inject by saying that Chris Barber tour came to my hometown of Wolverhampton. The fact that she stood on the same stage that I then decades later stood on blows my mind. But sorry, I had to just interject and say that because it makes me very happy.
26:42Joe Boyd:I mean, one of the sadnesses of my life, you know, is that I thought this tour was unbelievable. It was like the greatest thing. And I thought, America has to see this show. Sister Rosetta, Muddy, Gary Davis. And I went back and convinced George Ween to give me the money to go out to college bookers and try and sell them this package. Nobody was interested. You know, that whole surge that happened later where white audiences were bowing before Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters.
27:17Beverley Knight:She missed it. She missed it. Just a final question, Beverly. Do you think she ever found happiness outside music? Yes. Oh, yeah.
27:30Gayle Wald:One thing that we haven't talked about and that in the show we lean into is that it was an accepted kind of open secret that she found happiness with women as well as men. and Marie Knight was a great love in her life. I know Marie Knight was very reticent to speak on those matters, but friends and associates of the time, especially when they were younger, have said it was very much an open secret. So my own characterisation is I lean into that because I want my character of Rosetta to be a joyful woman and to be a completely joyful woman.
28:18Beverley Knight:So do I. That's a nice way to end this programme. And so she was. And so she was, yes.
28:24Joe Boyd:In my experience of her.
28:25Beverley Knight:My thanks to everyone who helped with the making of this important programme, particularly you, Beverly Knight, and you, Joe Boyd, too. And my advice to listeners is to go and seek out Sister Rosetta Tharp on the internet where she is very much still alive. Goodbye.
From the publisher
She influenced Elvis, Johnny Cash, Churck Berry, Little Richard and host of British blues acts of the 1960s. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, with her Gibson SG and wondrous voice, was a pioneer, and she's been nominated for Great Lives by Beverley Knight, singing star turned west end actress. The programme also features the great Joe Boyd, who was tour manager of the Blues and Gospel Caravan that came to Britain in 1964 with Sister Rosetta and Muddy Waters too. This is a show you have to hear. Also features archive of Little Richard, Dionne Warwick, and Sister Rosetta's biographer Gayle Wald, author of Shout, Sister, Shout!
Beverley Knight's hits include Shoulda Coulda Woulda and she won an Olivier award for her role as Emmeline Pankhurts in Sylvia at the Old Vic in London; she is currently appearing in Marie and Rosetta in the West End. The presenter is Matthew Parris, the producer Miles Warde.
Future guests on the series include Alistair McGowan, Coco Khan, Ade Edmondson and Count Binface who has picked Peter Cook.
