ARCHIVE
SISTER ROSETTA THARPE
Live In France: The 1966 Concert In Limoges
Long-buried tapes of a gospel great.
By Richard Williams
DEEP DIGS/ELEMENTAL MUSIC
HANSHARZHEIM
9/10
STANDING ontheplatform of a disused railway station in south Manchester one cold and damp day in the spring of 1964, wearing a voluminous winter coat, a curly blonde wig and a white Gibson SG guitar, Sister Rosetta Tharpe attempted to repel the elements by delivering a rousing version of the gospel song “Didn’t It Rain” to an audience of young white people seated, appropriately enough, on the other side of the tracks. The presence of a Granada TV crew, for whom her performance in the American Folk Blues Festival – along with those of Muddy Waters and the Reverend Gary Davis – was mounted, provides later generations with a lasting record of how Tharpe, born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas in 1915 and raised in the Church of God in Christ, could make the most of any environment.