Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Shout, Sister, Shout
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Women in Time is a literary biography series about extraordinary women who lived against the grain – and changed everything. Intimate and historically grounded, each book blends personal narrative with cultural storytelling to reveal not just what these women did, but how they became.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Shout, Sister, Shout tells the story of the guitar-wielding genius who split the sound barrier between sacred and secular – and rewrote American music in the process. Long before the world had words like rock and roll, Rosetta Tharpe was already playing it, preaching it, and bending gospel into rhythm with a voice like thunder and fingers that lit the fretboard on fire.
Born in rural Arkansas and raised on Holiness tradition, Rosetta was a prodigy before she was a teenager. She played revivals beside her firebrand mother, fused church with showmanship in ways that startled her elders, and broke through color lines, gender roles, and genre boundaries without ever asking permission. She sang for God in juke joints and stomped gospel into nightclub stages – amplified, electrified, and utterly herself.
This is not just a story of musical innovation. It’s a story of tension: between praise and performance, between legacy and survival, between the woman Rosetta was raised to be and the artist she insisted on becoming. Through first-hand accounts, textured detail, and unsentimental storytelling, Shout, Sister, Shout traces Rosetta’s path from tent revivals to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, from unmarked gravesite to global rediscovery.
You’ll meet the voices that shaped her – her unrelenting mother, her brilliant partner Marie Knight, her complicated manager-husband Russell Morrison – and the shadows she cast across artists who followed in her wake. Elvis studied her. Little Richard watched her. Jimi Hendrix learned from her. But no one ever replaced her.
This is the definitive narrative biography of a woman who wasn’t just ahead of her time – she made her time. And whether you hear her echo in church choirs, guitar solos, or subway hums, one thing is certain: Sister Rosetta Tharpe is still ringing.