Shout, Sister, Shout! by Gayle Wald

Author:Gayle Wald [Wald, Gayle F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0989-5
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2007-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

8

SISTER IN OPRYLAND (1952)

Every now and then someone would come around like Sister Rosetta Tharpe that really made an impression on you.

Gordon Stoker

At the conclusion of her “honeymoon” tour, Rosetta and Russell retreated to Barton Avenue. But while Rosetta welcomed the return home, Russell was restless. “He didn’t like Richmond,” says Annie Morrison matter-of-factly. To a self-made man who had found Pittsburgh too cramped for his teenaged dreams and who had never lived below the Mason-Dixon Line, Richmond seemed perilously Southern and provincial, a place sorely lacking in the hustle and bustle (especially hustle) on which Russell thrived.

Russell’s antipathy to Richmond irked Marie, who stayed in touch with Rosetta, although they once again went separate ways. It was enough that he had insinuated himself so completely into Rosetta’s orbit; that he couldn’t even bring himself to disguise his impatience with life in Richmond seemed arrogant and selfish. Since Rosetta’s money paid for the roof over Russell’s head—not to mention the car in the driveway and the new clothes on his back—she didn’t think he had a right to complain. Marie had always felt wary of Russell, and this new development only fed her mistrust.

Rosetta coasted for a time on the wedding concert’s adrenaline boost of publicity, spending the money she made from it as quickly as it came in. Like many musicians, especially those who grew up poor, Rosetta gave little thought to the financial details of her career. It was more satisfying to spend her earnings than to attend to the details of investing them. On the road in the South, she frequently opened her pockets to fans who clearly needed the money more than she did. She had William J. Bailey, her attorney and sometime road manager, take care of her legal affairs. To Russell she left the everyday details of collecting fees and paying the bills on time.

In 1952, Rosetta was no longer the nation’s most popular gospel soloist; that title clearly belonged to Mahalia. To many listeners, Rosetta had begun to sound countrified and old-fashioned. On the other hand, she could still claim importance and even uniqueness as a gospel guitarist. The image that photographer James Kriegsmann had created around 1938—of a player organically connected to her instrument—had not lost its luster. In the postwar period, Rosetta was the only “hot” guitarist in the gospel world, not merely the only woman guitarist. Moreover, whereas many acoustic players had faltered once electric instruments became common, Rosetta made the switch gracefully. Her expressive singing was in some ways better suited to the electric instrument, with its greater sustain, than to the acoustic guitar, on which she by necessity had a “busier” style. With the electric guitar, “there’s a cohesiveness between the way she plays and sings, which wasn’t there in her acoustic,” notes writer and guitarist Elijah Wald. “She had to deal with huge rooms of shouting parishioners. . . . She and T-Bone [Walker] to me are the two people who really invented an electric guitar that was not simply an imitation of an acoustic.

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