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| CURIO |
Volume 29, Number 5
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| From Revival to Rock ’n’ Roll |
Rosetta Tharpe never had Mahalia Jackson’s political cachet or her connection to the civil rights movement. Earlier that summer, she had appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, but she remained at best marginal to the folk scene, whose core audiences preferred the music of pioneering freedom singers like Odetta, a proud black woman who wore her hair in a “natural”—unlike Rosetta, who wore her hair in a mortifyingly out-of-date pressed and dyed style. At Newport, moreover, where the acoustic guitar was considered authentic, Rosetta’s new solid-body white Gibson SG custom electric instrument, said to have set her back $750, lost its significance as a symbol of her modernity and polish.
In England, on the other hand, Rosetta’s music was attracting a new cohort of fans. As early as 1957, Rosetta had told London’s Daily Mirror, “All this new stuff they call rock ’n’ roll, why, I’ve been playing that for years now.” Now, toting a glossy instrument with impressive-looking stainless steel hardware, she was making good on that claim. If there was anyone to contradict her, it was not Marie [Knight, her former singing partner]. Rock and roll actually started from the church, because it’s [about] time, and music is time,” she says. “If there is no time and no beat, there is no sound. Ninety percent of rock-and-roll artists came out of the church, their foundation is the church. . . . All the way back as far as you can go back, rock-and-roll artists started in the church.” In England, Rosetta’s instrument announced her status as “rock.” I was there at the beginning,” it said, “and I’m still here. Just watch what I can do.”. . .
No other American woman was as central to the transatlantic flow of sound that we know today as the British Invasion as Sister Rosetta Tharpe. A woman among men and a gospel musician among secular blues players, she was still somewhat sidelined as an anomaly. Paradoxically, however, the very qualities that had always rendered Rosetta an outsider—her flamboyance, her over-the-top style, her association with the guitar, her need to differentiate herself from other Pentecostals through unconventional choices and outrageous behavior—rendered her irresistibly compelling to the British blues-rockers of the 1960s. “We had heard the original rock ’n’ roll—Buddy Holly, Elvis and Gene, Vincent, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry,” said Moody Blues drummer Graeme Edge in 1992. “We put all of that together, and at the same time, discovered another 30 years of American experience on record—Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee [sic], Sister Rosetta Tharpe and all of those people. Then we repackaged it and sold it back in a very free approach.”
From: Shout, Sister, Shout! by Galyle Wald
Copyright © 2006 by Galye F. Wald
Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston
| Road to the White House, 1908 Edition |
One hundred years ago, the presidential election pitted the economic populist William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party against William Howard Taft of the Republican party. Two minor clippings reflect, in the first case, the typical candidate-votes-for-self story and, in the second case, a not-so-typical odd-voter story.
From New-York Daily Tribune, Wednesday, November 4, 1908
FOUR SHERMANS VOTE.
Vice-Presidential Candidate and Sons Go to Booth Together.
Utica, Nov. 3.—JAMES S. SHERMAN, THE REPUBLICAN candidate for Vice-President, accompanied by his three sons, went to the election booth in the 3d District in the 7th Ward about 10:30 this morning. There was no unusual crowd around the polls and no special incident occurred. Mr. Sherman voted ballot No. 328. He was behind the curtain of the voting machine about six seconds, and was immediately followed by his sons, Sherrill, Richard and “Tom.” The boys voted in about the same time as their father, and Mr. Sherman suggested that at least four straight Republican votes had been cast. He laid a handful of cigars on the table occupied by the officials, nodded pleasantly to some of the workers about the polls and stepped out to re-enter his automobile. A local photographer held him up to take several pictures, and then Mr. Sherman rode back to his home. There were less than a dozen persons present besides the regular officials and the poll watchers.
INCIDENTS OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
Odd and Amusing Happenings at the Ballot Box
FOR BRYAN—
ADJUDGED INSANE.
[By Telegraph to The Tribune.]
Cleveland. Nov. 3.—BECAUSE OF HIS INSANE ENTHUSIASM for Bryan shown by all-night cheering and by a frantic outburst after he had cast his ballot this morning, Richard Hibberce. of No. 2646 East 69th street, to-day was arrested. Later Probate Judge Hadden adjudged him insane, and he is cheering wildly in a cell in the Newburg State Hospital. Hibberce led the cheering in the big Bryan demonstration here last Friday night, interrupting the nominee’s speech.
Literary characters exact their vengeance. The Rival Richards or Sheakspear in Danger,
an 1814 cartoon by artist William Heath, depicts Shakespeare caught between two of his
kingly subjects. The righteous indignation of the Richards is guaranteed immortality
thanks to the cataloging of the Folger Shakespeare Library, with support from NEH.
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| —Folger Shakespeare Library |
| Golem Revival |
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Translated into English for the first time, with NEH support, by Curt Leviant,
The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague compiles twenty legendary
stories that did not actually spring from legends, but from the imagination
of a business-savvy Polish rabbi..
The most vivid, pervasive and influential version of the golem legend emerges from sixteenth-century Prague and is indelibly linked with Rabbi Loew (1525–1609), the famous spiritual leader of the Prague Jewish community, known as the Maharal (an acronym for Morenu Ha-Rav Loew). The legend of the Maharal and the golem he made for his own personal use, to fetch water and chop wood, makes its debut in the first third of the nineteenth century. None of the Maharal’s works nor those of his contemporaries mentions the golem legend, nor do any writings of the Maharal’s disciples. Furthermore, whatever tales of the golem circulated either orally or in writing had him doing domestic tasks and nothing more. But then, in 1909, in Warsaw, a singular event occurred that changed the direction of the legend for the rest of the twentieth century and prompted the efflorescence of this story in so many branches of art. It was the appearance of Niflo’es Maharal (actual full title, The Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague with the Golem), by Yudl Rosenberg—a short book of stories about the Prague rabbi and the golem he created. As an Orthodox rabbi in Warsaw, in a community that viewed fiction as frivolous and utterly outside the Jewish tradition of Torah study, Rosenberg had to disguise his authorship of the book. He resorted to the classic ruse of the “discovered” manuscript à la Defoe in Robinson Crusoe and Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, who also pretended their books were written by someone else, as did Alexander Dumas, who in his preface to his Three Musketeers (1844) claims he discovered his text in the Royal Library. To an unsuspecting public, Rosenberg was able to pass off his own book as if it had been written hundreds of years earlier by the Maharal’s son-in-law, Rabbi Isaac Katz. (To this day some people still believe this.) Rosenberg’s claim that the Maharal’s son-in-law wrote the book naturally enhanced its value. Readers were more eager to buy a book about the Maharal and the golem written by a relative than one by an unknown Warsaw rabbi. Copyright © 2007 by Curt Leviant. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.
Humanities, September/October 2008, Volume 29, Number 5
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