Musician Tharpe to be toasted on 101st birthday

Cotton Plant is throwing a party Saturday for its most famous daughter.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whose guitar playing, singing and brassy performances helped bring gospel music to the mainstream, would have turned 101 on Sunday, and her hometown is celebrating with a concert, a showing of a documentary on Tharpe, food and a proclamation from the mayor.

"We're excited about the tribute," says Angela Ryland, director and curator of the Cotton Plant Historical Museum. Ryland was born and raised in Cotton Plant, left in 1985, and returned in 2010. "We have such a great history here, and with all the people she influenced, we'd like to capture some of that for this city."

The event starts at 1 p.m. with a reading from Mayor Willard C. Ryland -- why, yes, he and Angela are husband and wife -- of last year's proclamation making March 20, 2015, Sister Rosetta Tharpe Day in Cotton Plant.

Then the performances begin, with musicians playing some of Tharpe's most famous tunes. Lovie Wofford, Edward Floyd, Judy Williams Cornelious and Stephen Koch will pull out their versions of tracks like "This Train," "Didn't It Rain," "I Want A Tall Skinny Papa," "Up Above My Head" and others.

Backing them up will be a band featuring Wofford and Koch on guitars, bassist James Phillip, lead guitarist Ivory Mitchell, drummer Felicia Wofford Shelton, saxophonist Ira Crite and Robert Brown on keyboards.

The 2013 documentary Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock and Roll, which was part of PBS' American Masters series, will be also shown.

Vendors will sell fish, funnel cakes, hot dogs and burgers, with a portion of the proceeds going to the museum.

Angela Ryland said there are plans to make the tribute an annual event, and hopes to make it bigger every year.

Tharpe was born in Cotton Plant on March 20, 1915. At just 4 years old, she was playing guitar and singing gospel songs with her mother, Katie Bell Nubin Atkins. She and her mother toured as a gospel act throughout the South and by the mid-'30s, settled in Chicago. Rosetta Tharpe was signed to Decca Records in 1938 and quickly started cranking out hits. Early in her career, she was able to maintain her gospel audience while crossing over into the mainstream with secular hits.

She was so popular that in 1951, 25,000 people paid to see her wedding to manager Russell Morrison (husband No. 3) at Washington's Griffin Stadium.

"She was doing stuff on the guitar that would have seemed ahead of its time 25 years ago, and this was in the 1940s," says Koch, an Arkansas music historian whose Arkansongs radio program on KUAR-FM, 89.1, has regularly featured Tharpe. "She was doing things that men couldn't even pull off, and to do it in gospel music was just outrageous." Koch compares her to guitar giants like Jimi Hendrix and Les Paul.

Writing about Tharpe at the encyclopediaofarkansas.net, William K. McNeil of the Arkansas Folk Center and Terry Buckalew of Helena, note that as a guitarist, "she played individual tones, melodies and riffs instead of just strumming chords. This talent was all the more remarkable because, at the time, few African-American women played guitar."

Fellow Arkansas Delta music giant Johnny Cash called her his favorite singer; Elvis and Bob Dylan cited her as an influence; and Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes is traveling down the road Tharpe paved.

By the '60s, Tharpe's popularity waned, but she continued to tour. She lost a leg to a stroke in 1970 and died in Philadelphia in 1973.

A biography, Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, by Gayle Wald, was published in 2007.

Ask Ryland her favorite Tharpe songs and she'll tell you she hasn't got one. She's got two.

"I like 'That's All.' It's one of her more feisty tunes and I'm kinda feisty," she says with a laugh. "And I like 'Strange Things Are Happening Every Day.'"

The latter song could almost be a theme song for her tiny Woodruff County hometown, population 649, and an inspiration, she says, for a festival and a tribute that could bring people to Cotton Plant.

"People don't believe Cotton Plant will grow," she says, "but strange things happen every day and I believe we can make things happen."

Weekend on 03/17/2016