NRR Project: Sister Rosetta Tharpe plays 'Down by the Riverside' (1944)

 

NRR Project: ‘Down by the Riverside’

American Spiritual

Performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe with the Lucky Millinder Orchestra

Recorded 1944

3:04

“Sister” Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973) was nothing less than the wellspring of rock and roll. Her killer guitar work, coupled with her inventive, high-charged vocals, made musical history. She called rock and roll just sped-up rhythm and blues. She pioneered work on the electric guitar.

Rosetta Tharpe was a child prodigy from Cotton Plant, Arkansas who played guitar and sang gospel songs for years at the Church of God in Christ. In 1938, at age 23, she began to record for Decca. In this same year, her other gospel single, “Strange Things Happening Every Day,” was a hit; this, too, proved popular.

Tharpe brings an overwhelming intensity to her performances. She is emphatic, precise; she can scat, she can warble. Her guitar work is rough, loud, nimble-fingered. She plays like someone who has had to play to lots of large live crowds. Her attack on a song is no-holds-barred; the church disapproved of some of her more secular hits as “I Want a Tall Skinny Papa.”

By and large, though, what she performed was a sacred music transformed by her in accordance with the driving rhythms of urgency, a blues sensibility, and virtuoso sing-shouting that became the voice that rockers aspired to but could not imitate. She mixes together the best of everything; she is sui generis.

Here, she begins to skit-scat through the lyrics about halfway through, then takes a guitar break that is tough, that swings. That break would influence countless guitarists.

As she moves to the climax of the song, she burns even hotter. She moves to full-on vocalese, a kind of speechful speechlessness that is the stuff of gospel and jazz and rock. The phrase “ain’t gonna study war no more” is powerful because it is for meant for real. It has conviction, and it is repeated with a vibrant insistence unfound elsewhere.

Her 2003 compilation “The Gospel of the Blues” gives you all of her best work. She was decades ahead of her time. In 1998, she belatedly appeared on a 32-cent stamp.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.