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Hardrock69
03-28-2006, 03:18 PM
Here's a video clip of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, playing her Gibson SG and performing Down By The Riverside on the Chicago-based television show TV Gospel Time, sometime in the early to mid-Sixties:

LINKY (http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/2006/03/rosetta_tharpe.mpeg)

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/images/rosetta.jpg

This clip was shot well after the peak of Tharpe's career in the 30's and the 40's, but it's the first chance I've had to see video of another one of my personal guitar heroes. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the first recording artists to play lead guitar, starting to do so in the 1920's. She started playing guitar at the age of four, billed as "Little Rosetta Nubin, the singing and guitar playing miracle," as she performed at tent revivals throughout the south.

Tv_gospel_timeI couldn't find out much about this clip - it's from the enhanced audio CD of Shout Sister Shout, a Tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and it was part of the weekly TV show TV Gospel Time, which aired nationally in the 1950s and 60s. Our own Kevin Nutt aired this track and a batch of other TV Gospel Time recordings on this May 2002 edition of his great show Sinner's Crossroads.

Regardless of the exact date of this performance, this was a period of Tharpe's career when she was attempting a U.S. comeback, after alienating her religious fans with her secular music, and then alienating her white fans with the blues sides she cut in the 1950s. She suffered a stroke in 1970 and died in 1973.

Gringo
03-28-2006, 05:27 PM
Wow!!!

She played kickass rock and roll-guitar long before many of what we like to call guitarheroes...

I saw a clip, and i think it was from the same show as this, in Martin Scorsese's blues-series.

A very cool lady, i must say!

DlocRoth
03-28-2006, 05:39 PM
She be wailin!

Hardrock69
03-29-2006, 10:09 AM
Wonder if Loons The Great has seen this...

Loons The Great
03-30-2006, 07:55 AM
I love Sister Rosetta Thorpe!!
Awesome, awesome clip!!

Play 'em ol' gospel blues, mama!!