When I was a wee lad I was inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of rock and roll. Where did it come from? Who start­ed it? But also when I was wee, there didn’t seem to be a lot of infor­ma­tion around, cer­tain­ly not in my library down­town. But when Mud­dy Waters died in 1983, I start­ed to under­stand that rock and roll was sped-up blues, and pieces start­ed to slot togeth­er. How­ev­er, women weren’t part of the equa­tion. (Blame Rolling Stone Mag­a­zine).

That’s a long way of say­ing the Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe should be bet­ter known than she is, espe­cial­ly as one dubbed the God­moth­er of Rock and Roll. Play­ing scratchy, dis­tort­ed elec­tric gui­tar and singing as if on a direct line to heav­en, Tharpe would go on to influ­ence every­body from Elvis Pres­ley to Chuck Berry, and every­body who came after her. So why is she not more of a house­hold name?

The 2011 BBC doc­u­men­tary above (split into four 15-minute chunks) resus­ci­tates a leg­end who not only played a mean gui­tar but set the stan­dard for the gospel-crossover artist, mak­ing a name on the gospel cir­cuit, but mak­ing her fame in the sec­u­lar night­clubs of Amer­i­ca. Tharpe’s dis­tinc­tion is that she returned to gospel with­out los­ing any of her edge.

A pre­co­cious young­ster in Arkansas dur­ing the ear­ly 1920s, she became the star of her Pen­te­costal church start­ing at four years old. Raised by her moth­er, then forced into an arranged mar­riage at 19-years-old to an old­er preach­er, Thomas Tharpe, she kept his name when she left their abu­sive mar­riage. She and her moth­er relo­cat­ed to Chica­go, where blues and jazz were inter­min­gling in a hot­house cul­ture. Dec­ca signed her, and although she told her church­go­ing friends that she had to sing these sec­u­lar songs because of that darned sev­en-year con­tract, Tharpe rose to fame quick­ly. The footage of her singing in front of the Cot­ton Club band led by Lucky Millinder is one of a cheeky, charm­ing 23 year old.

As the doc makes clear, Tharpe had a rebel­lious streak, didn’t do what she was told, and pushed bound­aries in a very seg­re­gat­ed Amer­i­ca. She invit­ed the all-white Jor­danaires to tour with her, sur­pris­ing house man­agers and book­ing agents alike. And she car­ried on a love affair and cre­ative part­ner­ship with fel­low gospel singer Marie Knight for decades, very much on the down low.

So per­haps this is the rea­son Tharpe has not been on our col­lec­tive radar—we’ve been slow to admit that rock gui­tar was cre­at­ed by a queer black woman devot­ed to the Lord. Nobody in the audi­ence knew this, though, at the aban­doned rail­way sta­tion at Wilbra­ham Road, Man­ches­ter, in May 1964. On one side of the station’s tracks, British teenagers were gath­ered to hear raw, rock and roll from Amer­i­ca. On the oth­er side, Tharpe stands with her gui­tar, wear­ing a thick coat to pro­tect her from the spring rain. Backed by her band, she chan­nels a holy force and sings about the rain of the Great Flood, the lyrics abstract and repet­i­tive, as if in a trance. The footage opens the doc­u­men­tary and makes as good a case as any of why Tharpe should be part of the pan­theon of rock roy­al­ty. (You can see the whole clip here.) Back in the States, Tharpe had been eclipsed by Mahalia Jack­son, but the Brits didn’t know any of that. They just sense they’ve tapped into one of the sources for the music explod­ing around them.

It took until 2018 for Tharpe to be induct­ed into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, years after all those white boy copy­cats. Now is the time to re-dis­cov­er her and hear what you’ve been miss­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Web Project Immor­tal­izes the Over­looked Women Who Helped Cre­ate Rock and Roll in the 1950s

An Intro­duc­tion to Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe

Mud­dy Waters and Friends on the Blues and Gospel Train, 1964

Watch the Hot Gui­tar Solos of Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe

Revis­it The Life & Music of Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe: ‘The God­moth­er of Rock and Roll’

The Women of Rock: Dis­cov­er an Oral His­to­ry Project That Fea­tures Pio­neer­ing Women in Rock Music

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Char­lie Watts, the Rolling Stones’ icon­ic drum­mer since 1962, passed away yes­ter­day from unspec­i­fied caus­es at the age of 80. His death is a great loss for rock and roll. “When Char­lie Watts dies, the beat stops,” Rob Harvil­la writes at the Ringer, “nev­er to be played again with such mes­mer­iz­ing force, with such ultra-suave propul­sion, with such casu­al­ly indomitable rad­ness.” These are not tech­ni­cal terms, and Watts was not a tech­ni­cal drum­mer. “I’m not a para­did­dle man,” he said in 2000. “It’s not tech­ni­cal, it’s emo­tion­al. One of the hard­est things of all is to get that feel­ing across.”

Watts per­fect­ed the inde­fin­able feel of rock and roll by way of jazz, play­ing along to his favorite records by Char­lie Park­er — first with a set of wire brush­es on an unstrung ban­jo, then on the first drum kit his father bought him.

From the greats, he learned to swing and mas­tered dynam­ics. The com­mand­ing mar­tial crack of Watts’ snare held a band of mot­ley pirates togeth­er — with­out him, the Stones might have dis­solved into a col­lec­tion of preen­ing antics and wan­der­ing blues licks; with him at the cen­ter, they coa­lesced into a team. “I don’t know how the hell that old suck­er got to be so good,” Keef mar­veled.

Watts would be the last one to talk about how good he was — he hat­ed inter­views and star­dom in gen­er­al. “I’ve nev­er been inter­est­ed in all that stuff and still am not,” he said. “I don’t know what show­biz is and I’ve nev­er watched MTV. There are peo­ple who just play instru­ments, and I’m pleased to know that I’m one of them.” His sin­gu­lar focus came from lis­ten­ing intent­ly to what oth­ers were doing, as he says in the inter­view at the top, and copy­ing what they did, a method he calls “one of my flaws…. I learned by watch­ing.” But the means by which Watts learned to play made him the per­fect drum­mer for the Stones. He watched, lis­tened, learned the songs, then played them per­fect­ly in tune with the band, keep­ing them in time while respond­ing dynam­i­cal­ly to Richards and Jagger’s inter­play.

“I should have gone to school and learned how to do it,” Watts says, with typ­i­cal self-dep­re­ca­tion. Instead, he made his school the jazz clubs of Lon­don and Paris, where he went to see Bud Pow­ell’s drum­mer Ken­ny Clark. Just as he’d done in his room on his first drum kit, he lis­tened intent­ly and copied what he heard. Watts looked like a man who stood apart from the band, with his world-weary expres­sion, end­less col­lec­tion of sharp suits and reserved demeanor. But when he played with the Stones, they locked togeth­er. It was love, he said, “I love this band.”

His life was a tes­ta­ment to the vital­i­ty of the music that made him, at 80, still want to go back on the road after announc­ing just two weeks ago that he’d have to sit out this year’s tour. Forty years ago, Watts couldn’t fore­see the band he helped make world famous last­ing very much longer. “I nev­er thought it would last five min­utes,” he said in 1981, “but I fig­ured I’d live that five min­utes to the hilt because I love them. They’re big­ger than I am if you real­ly want to know. I admire them, I like them as friends, I argue with them and I love them…. I don’t real­ly care if it stops…. “ Now that he’s gone, it’s hard to see how the Stones can go on.

As near­ly every mem­ber of the band, espe­cial­ly Richards, has said at one time or anoth­er, no Char­lie Watts, no Rolling Stones. “Charlie’s the engine,” said Ron­nie Wood in the Stones doc­u­men­tary Tip of the Tongue. “We don’t go any­where with­out the engine.” Wher­ev­er they go now, there’s no ques­tion the Rolling Stones would have been a dif­fer­ent band entire­ly with­out him. See some of his best live moments in the clips above and learn what Char­lie him­self thought of his play­ing in the short doc­u­men­tary at the top, “If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” a record of his approach to drum­ming and life in gen­er­al that cap­tures the true spir­it of a rock leg­end.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Char­lie Watts-Cen­tric View of the Rolling Stones: Watch Mar­tin Scorsese’s Footage of Char­lie & the Band Per­form­ing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “All Down the Line”

Rolling Stones Drum­mer Char­lie Watts Writes a Children’s Book Cel­e­brat­ing Char­lie Park­er (1964)

A Visu­al His­to­ry of The Rolling Stones Doc­u­ment­ed in a Beau­ti­ful, 450-Page Pho­to Book by Taschen

The Sto­ry of the Rolling Stones: A Selec­tion of Doc­u­men­taries on the Quin­tes­sen­tial Rock-and-Roll Band

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Self-pro­claimed tra­di­tion­al­ists love to talk about how allow­ing women in the work­force pre­cip­i­tat­ed social decline. This is a delu­sion. “Women have always worked,” as Amer­i­can labor his­to­ri­an Alice Kessler-Har­ris argued in her book of the same name. “In prein­dus­tri­al soci­eties,” she writes, “near­ly every­body worked” in coop­er­a­tive endeav­ors, “and almost nobody worked for wages.” And in indus­tri­al soci­eties, women have always worked, and they were often the pri­ma­ry earn­ers in their fam­i­lies. But since their sto­ries do not fit a tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive, they’ve been ignored. 

Mov­ing goal­posts and nar­row def­i­n­i­tions of what counts as “work” have mar­gin­al­ized women’s con­tri­bu­tions in hun­dreds of fields, includ­ing music. But women have always writ­ten music, whether or not they’ve been com­pen­sat­ed or rec­og­nized as pro­fes­sion­al com­posers.

In some cas­es, their careers were cut short before they could begin. Such was the fate of Mozart’s sis­ter, Maria Anna, who was also a child prodi­gy, trav­el­ing Europe with her broth­er and daz­zling the aris­toc­ra­cy in the 1700s. Her accom­plish­ments “were quick­ly for­got­ten,” writes Ashifa Kas­sam at The Guardian, “after she was forced to halt her career when she came of age.”

Maria Anna Mozart is one of hun­dreds of women com­posers you’ll find in the inter­ac­tive map cre­at­ed by Saki­ra Ven­tu­ra, a music teacher from Valen­cia, Spain, who has col­lect­ed 530 com­posers, placed them geo­graph­i­cal­ly on the map, and includ­ed links to Wikipedia pages, web­sites, and Spo­ti­fy. The map is in Span­ish, as are all of the short biogra­phies in each composer’s win­dow, but Ven­tu­ra links to their Eng­lish-lan­guage Wikipedia pages, mak­ing this an excel­lent resource for Eng­lish speak­ers as well, and a much-need­ed one, Ven­tu­ra found out when she began her research.

When Mozart’s sis­ter was writ­ing music, “It was tak­en for grant­ed that a work com­posed by a woman would­n’t be of the same qual­i­ty as that com­posed by a man,” Ven­tu­ra says. Not much has changed. When crit­ics have asked why she does­n’t include men on her map, “I have to explain to them that if they want to find out about male com­posers, they can open any book on music his­to­ry, go to any con­cert or tune into any radio sta­tion. But if I’m putting togeth­er a map of female com­posers, it is because these women don’t appear any­where else.” Vis­it the inter­ac­tive map, Creado­ras de la His­to­ria Músi­ca, here.

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Maria Anna Mozart Was a Musi­cal Prodi­gy Like Her Broth­er Wolf­gang, So Why Did She Get Erased from His­to­ry?

1200 Years of Women Com­posers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now

Cel­e­brat­ing Women Com­posers: A New BBC Dig­i­tal Archive Takes You from Hilde­gard of Bin­gen (1098) to Nadia Boulanger (1979)

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

“There’s no love song fin­er, but how strange the change from major to minor, every­time we say good­bye.”

In the line above from Cole Porter’s “Every Time We Say Good­bye,” we’re moved from the hap­pi­ness of love to the sad­ness of part­ing, and so too do the chords change, from major to minor, thus sub­tly chang­ing the mood of the song. The tech­nique is a clever exam­ple of a song­writ­ing method called “word paint­ing,” or prosody, when lyrics are accom­pa­nied by a rhyth­mic, melod­ic, or har­mon­ic shift that com­ple­ments their mean­ing. We hear it in pop music all the time, draw­ing our atten­tion to sig­nif­i­cant moments, and shap­ing the emo­tion­al impact of words and phras­es.

The word “Stop,” for exam­ple, appears over and over in pop music, as the video above from David Ben­nett shows, accom­pa­nied by a full stop from the band. Span­ish-lan­guage hit “Despaci­to” (which means “slow­ly”) slows the tem­po while the tit­u­lar word is sung. There are innu­mer­able exam­ples of melodies ris­ing and falling to lyrics like “high, up, down” and “low.” A more sophis­ti­cat­ed exam­ple of word pain­ing comes from Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah,” which tells us exact­ly what the music’s doing — “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift.”

As inge­nious as these moves are, Ben­nett goes on to show us how word paint­ing can be “even more nuanced” in clas­sics like The Doors’ “Rid­ers on the Storm.” As Ray Man­zarek him­self explains in an inter­view clip, his key­board part led to an ono­matopoeia effect: lyrics, melody, and sound effects all com­ing togeth­er to express the entire theme. Ben­nett shows in his sec­ond word paint­ing video, above, how stu­dio effects can also be used to sync music and lyrics, such as the murky eq effect applied to Bil­lie Eilish’s voice on the word “under­wa­ter” in her song “Every­thing I Want­ed.”

Exam­ples of effects like this date back at least to Jimi Hen­drix, who pio­neered the stu­dio as a song­writ­ing tool, but word paint­ing as a song­writ­ing method requires no spe­cial tech­nol­o­gy. The Jack­son Five’s “ABC,” for instance, lands on E♭ and C dur­ing the line “I before E except after C,” and the famous cho­rus is sung to the notes A♭, B♭m7, and C. Here, the notes them­selves tell the sto­ry, sim­ple but undoubt­ed­ly effec­tive. All of the exam­ples Ben­nett adduces may come from pop­u­lar music, but word paint­ing is as old as poet­ry, which was once insep­a­ra­ble from song. For as long as humans have com­mu­ni­cat­ed with lit­er­ary epics, funer­al rites, tragedies, come­dies, and love songs, we have used prosody to shape words with music, and music accord­ing to the mean­ing of our words.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

Naked­ly Exam­ined Music Pod­cast Explores Song­writ­ing with Crack­er, King Crim­son, Cut­ting Crew, Jill Sob­ule & More

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Bri­an Eno kept busy dur­ing last year’s pan­dem­ic, telling the L.A. Times this past Jan­u­ary about one of his lat­est ideas, an open source Zoom alter­na­tive, just one of any num­ber of projects he’s kick­ing around at any giv­en time. One of the most pro­lif­ic and influ­en­tial artists, musi­cians, pro­duc­ers, and thinkers of the past sev­er­al decades, Eno is such a cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion, he war­rants his own appre­ci­a­tion day. That’s just what he got on Feb­ru­ary 12, 1988 when KPFA (a radio sta­tion in Berke­ley, CA) turned over an entire day to host­ing Eno for wide-rang­ing inter­views, sto­ries about his col­lab­o­ra­tions, and con­ver­sa­tions about the musi­cal gen­res he invent­ed. He even takes ques­tions, and his replies are illu­mi­nat­ing and urbane.

Eno’s always been a gen­er­ous and wit­ty con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist. The Bri­an Eno Day broad­cast hits on near­ly all of the major high­lights of his career up to that point, with a com­pre­hen­sive overview of his work, ear­li­er inter­view record­ings, and loads of songs and excerpts from his exten­sive record­ed cor­pus. Much of this work is obscure and much of it is as well-known as the man him­self. One can­not tell the sto­ries of artists like U2, Talk­ing Heads, and David Bowie, for exam­ple, with­out talk­ing about Eno’s guid­ing hand as a pro­duc­er. Eno’s renowned for found­ing glam rock pio­neers Roxy Music, invent­ing ambi­ent music, and for his gen­er­a­tive approach­es to mak­ing art, whether on small paper cards or in soft­ware and apps.

Eno once said his first musi­cal instru­ment was a tape recorder, and he’s been obsessed with record­ing tech­nol­o­gy ever since, deliv­er­ing his influ­en­tial lec­ture “The Record­ing Stu­dio as a Com­po­si­tion­al Tool” in 1979 and demon­strat­ing its prin­ci­ples in all of the music he’s made. In these inter­views, Eno not only dis­cuss­es the major plot points, but also “reveals such tasty tid­bits as his dis­like for com­put­er key­boards; an admis­sion that even he does not know what his lyrics mean; a pref­er­ence for the music of Stock­hausen’s stu­dents rather than that of Stock­hausen him­self; and the dif­fer­ences between New Age, Min­i­mal, and Ambi­ent Music,” notes the descrip­tion on Inter­net Archive.

In the 33 years since this broad­cast, Eno has pro­duced enough music and visu­al art to fill anoth­er 10-hour day of inter­views and overviews. But his meth­ods have not changed: he has pur­sued his lat­er work with the same open­ness, curios­i­ty, and col­lab­o­ra­tive spir­it he devel­oped in his first few decades. Hear him in his ele­ment, rang­ing far afield in con­ver­sa­tions about archi­tec­ture, genet­ic evo­lu­tion, and his own video instal­la­tion pieces. Eno rarely gets per­son­al, pre­fer­ring to talk about his work, but it’s humil­i­ty, not secre­cy, that keeps him off the top­ic of him­self. As he recent­ly told a Guardian inter­view­er, “I’m not f*cking inter­est­ed at all in me. I want to talk about ideas.” Hear Eno do exact­ly that in 10 hours of record­ings just above.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Behold the Orig­i­nal Deck of Oblique Strate­gies Cards, Hand­writ­ten by Bri­an Eno Him­self

Bri­an Eno Presents a Crash Course on How the Record­ing Stu­dio Rad­i­cal­ly Changed Music: Hear His Influ­en­tial Lec­ture “The Record­ing Stu­dio as a Com­po­si­tion­al Tool” (1979)

Bri­an Eno Explains the Ori­gins of Ambi­ent Music

Hear Bri­an Eno Rein­vent Pachelbel’s Canon (1975)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness