Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

“She traveled the world and left it scorched with her fearlessness and musical originality, inspired fierce devotion from an audience who thrilled to her enormous gifts and her personal excesses, and shook the celestial rafters with the force of her artistic character. She was also my dad’s favorite singer. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born in 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, at the edge of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, one hundred and twenty miles northeast of where my dad was born seventeen years later in Kingsland, Arkansas. Sometimes he would shake his head and muse during odd or inexplicable events, “Strange things are happening every day,” which was a nod to the title of her most famous song. “Strange Things Happening Every Day” was a hit for her in 1945 and reached No. 2 on the “race” chart in Billboard magazine, the precursor of the Rhythm and Blues chart. She was a musical prodigy who sang, played guitar, and performed gospel songs in the Black Pentecostal church from the age of four, then traveled with her mother around the South, performing in churches as Little Rosetta Nubin, billed as the “Singing and Guitar Playing Miracle.”

She became Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1938, after leaving her first husband, Thomas J. Tharpe, and moving with her mother to New York City, by way of Chicago.” (By Rosanne Cash).