Rosetta Tharpe and Feminist “Un-Forgetting”

I did not set out to write a biography. When I first encountered the remarkable Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the musical trailblazer who became gospel’s first national superstar in the late 1930s, I was riveted. It was the late 1990s, I was at a conference on rock music at Duke University, and George Lipsitz had shown a videotape with a tantalizing clip of the performer doing “Down By the Riverside.” Who was this virtuoso singer-guitarist, I asked myself, and why didn’t I know anything about her? I wanted to pursue these questions, but I was also in the middle of finishing my tenure book, a study of racial passing in U.S. literature and culture, and could not be distracted. I made a mental Post-it note and moved on. But Rosetta Tharpe’s power as a performer, my interest in her music and influence, and my discovery of gaps and silences in even the best histories of U.S. popular music, eventually made me return to that filed-away germ of an idea.

Even then, I did not consider biography. Perhaps I was intimidated by the form, which seemed to demand the sort of intellectual “mastery” of which I was, and remain, deeply suspect. (By mastery I mean a mode of knowledge-production that privileges the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake or what might be described in this context as the intellectual equivalent of record collecting.) Perhaps I veered away from biography for disciplinary reasons. As an English Ph.D. trained in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had been taught (undoubtedly tacitly—I don’t remember anyone ever saying it out loud) to regard the “single-author” book, or a book concentrating on a single figure, as a professional dead end.

Perhaps I rejected the idea of biography for pragmatic reasons. My preliminary scholarship had turned up extraordinarily little about Tharpe, who seldom got mentioned in most histories of gospel, rhythm-and-blues, or rock-and-roll. Or perhaps it was a question of personal proclivities. The fact is I didn’t particularly like biography, especially biographies of popular musicians, which, I found, often centered the capacious brain of the (male) biographer rather than the subjectivity and creative production of the (male) musician. (See mastery above.) My favorite musical autobiographies—from such as-told-to’s as Etta James’s Rage to Survive to Charles Mingus’s fascinating Beneath the Underdog—had taught me that narratives about musicians and musical creativity could be both illuminating and pleasurable.¹ But I found most biographies off-putting.

In short, biography simultaneously intimidated me as a scholar and struck me as at least potentially flawed from a feminist standpoint, given the form’s enshrinement of individual subjectivity and achievement. In contrast, as Farah Jasmine Griffin had convinced me (through If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery, her 2001 work on Billie Holiday), biography could be a feminist enterprise, especially given that African American women musicians, unlike their male peers, seldom have been conceived in terms of their “genius.” As I had discovered at conferences, if I wanted to talk about Tharpe as a “window” into theoretical issues, I typically had to begin by recounting who she was for audiences who, understandably, either had never heard of her or knew very little about her. I told the five-minute version of Tharpe’s story so many times that it occurred to me that doing this in a more formal way, through biography, was precisely the “intervention” I needed to make.

This intuition resonated with the results of my early research about Rosetta Tharpe, which both confirmed her genius and, simultaneously, confirmed that this genius had been struck from the historical record. Indeed, from a historiographical perspective, the most compelling fact about this guitar dynamo, who went from being a child prodigy on the Pentecostal tent-meeting circuit in the 1920s to being one of the most well-known recording artists of the 1940s, was that she had been actively erased from musical memory and history. If a biography could arrest this erasure...