A little bit out of my sphere of interest, but it’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and that’s gotta be good.
I should really be putting this post under jeeeezus as well, as Tharpe is one of those big voice chicks who got it going on in revivalist shows originally.
Dancers know her for the stuff she did with Lucky Millinder (especially ‘Shout Sister Shout’), but she had a big rep as a stage performer.
I think I remember reading somewhere about her having to retune her guitar for white audiences in the north – apparently the distinctive southern tuning she used didn’t go down so well with the honkies. But this is a nice clip because it’s not all that often we see a black woman with a jazz/blues rep playing guitar on stage… Yes, yes, I know this is a 60s clip, and she’s playing gospel, but you know what I mean.
…I’m listening to a version of this song by Mahalia Jackson as I type… these chicks had freakin’ BIG voices.
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Do you know what was the guitar tuning she used?
I was doing a bit of followup on guitar tunings a while back after googling “alternative tuning for Venus in Furs” and finding out about the “ostrich” tuning. I imagine the tuning Tharp used was perhaps a traditional folk tuning like the “DADGAD” tuning which learnt about in the same google/wiki session.
I’d like to learn one or two things in alternative tuning when I get around to it!
I’d have to look it up – I read it in a journal article a few months ago… well, about a year ago. But I have the article, so it shouldn’t take me long to find it.