‘Rock 'n' roll music does not belong to white men'
'I wish I had been there, in the late 1930s, when Sister Rosetta Tharpe first plugged her guitar into her little transistor amp,' says Beverley Knight. 'That's when this young black woman – with her beautiful little dimples – created the sound we've come to associate with all those white, male rock gods. She originated the guitar solo. She was playing with feedback and distortion, she was... the godmother of rock 'n' roll.'
Today, it's only a kettle that Knight, the 1990s singer-turned-musical-theatre-star, is plugging in, during a break in rehearsals for the UK premiere of Marie and Rosetta, a musical bio-play by the Illinois-born George Brant, in which Knight plays Tharpe. But, briskly dropping teabags into our mugs, she comes to a righteous boil over the lack of recognition granted Tharpe these days.
'All those early, male rock 'n' roll artists were cool enough to give her credit,' she says. 'Elvis was obsessed with Rosetta. Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, all spoke about being inspired by her. Chuck Berry said his entire career was a tribute to her. Keith Richards knew she was one of the architects of the genre.' She shakes her head and tuts. 'But as the decades rolled on, that sound – along with its power stance – became the preserve of white dudes. To this day, overwhelmingly, the guitar is the preserve of men, and an extension of the phallus.'
But Knight doesn't just blame the white rock dudes for Tharpe's erasure from musical history. She takes equal aim at the black Pentecostal Church in which Tharpe and, decades and miles apart, Knight herself were raised: the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). Why? 'Because the Church gatekeeps reputations and legacies,' says Knight. 'Although Tharpe began and ended her musical career as part of her worship, she made a few sexy, secular records in the middle and [the Church] believed she should only have used her gifts to praise 'the gloreeey o' God',' she growls out the phrase in jowl-wobbling mockery of a macho American preacher's voice, then rolls her eyes. 'So friggin' stupid of them!'
Steam blown off, Knight settles down onto the sofa beside me and slips into the pedagogical storytelling mode that will be familiar to listeners of her long-running BBC Radio 2 show, Beverley's Gospel Nights. She reminds me that Tharpe was born in 1915 in the little town of Cotton Plant, Arkansas. Her parents were both singers, but after her birth, her father, Willis Atkins, 'ran out on them and went on to have about 17 more children'.
Tharpe was raised entirely by her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, a singer and mandolin-playing deaconess missionary and women's speaker for COGIC, who encouraged little Rosetta to sing and play guitar. She quickly displayed such virtuosity that she was performing in public by the age of six.
'Her mum was smart enough to see she had a prodigy – or a 'miracle' – on her hands,' says Knight. She could also see that the girl 'had too much swing in her hips' for a small town in 1920s America, 'so she took her Mozartesque child to Chicago'. There, in 1934, Rosetta married Thomas Thorpe, a COGIC preacher, only to leave him four years later (though keeping a version of his surname for her professional pseudonym) and move to New York with her mother to record gospel songs for Decca. Early singles such as Rock Me and That's All were instant hits and led to her playing at Harlem's Cotton Club alongside secular blues and jazz artists such as Cab Calloway – but they outraged the conservative COGIC community.
While she started out giving a lively new rhythm to spiritual songs, she was soon rocking out with more risqué material. Most scandalous was I Want a Tall Skinny Papa (1939), on which she sang of needing a man who had 'to do what he's told / And bring sweet mama that gold / Satisfy my soul / He's gotta be tall.' That may sound pretty tame by modern standards, but I've just watched Knight rehearsing a scene in which her Tharpe chuckles over all the men who hid that vinyl in the sleeves of holier records.
Brant's play – first performed off-Broadway in 2016 – is set in the 1940s, as Tharpe is trying to find her way back into the COGIC's good books. She's beginning rehearsals for a tour with her young protégée, Marie Knight (played in the UK production by the Zimbabwean-British Ntombizodwa Ndlovu in her London stage debut), who initially appears meeker and straighter-laced than her mentor, but turns out to be a secret fan of Tharpe's wilder side.
'I'm fairly sure Rosetta and Marie had a sexual relationship,' says Knight. 'She didn't come out as queer because of the Church. But I've been reading Gayle F Wald's brilliant biography of her [2007's Shout, Sister, Shout!] and apparently there were a lot of people who saw them together, claimed to have caught them 'in flagrante'. So... yeah. It was the same with a lot of those pioneering blues women making it in a man's world, women like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. They may have married men, but they were queer women living their own lives and refusing to stay in their lanes.'
Although Knight is straight (and has been happily married to James O'Keefe, a former lighting technician, since 2012), she relates to Tharpe's struggle to live on her own terms. Born in Wolverhampton in 1973, Knight was raised by Jamaican-born parents in the strict Pentescostal Church, where her mother, Deloris (who had come to England to train as a nurse), often led the congregation, and her father was known to the local community as 'the singing builder'. Little Beverley was 'singing my heart out in the pulpit from the age of four' and still credits the Church with 'teaching me to sing with everything I am, because that kind of ecstatic worship requires you to praise the Lord with everything you are… or it does until you hit puberty as a girl. At which point it wants to shut some parts of you away and lock them up.'
Knight – who has a degree in theology – credits both her parents' tolerance and 'the invention of the Walkman' for her teenage embrace of secular music. She says her family, 'all still massively into their church', gradually 'accepted that I had my own point of view and that I was the kind of kid who would really argue it. They had also seen the darker side of what keeping a kid in a religious straitjacket could do: the rebellion, fear, estrangement. They had seen it with friends and with family.' Meantime, Beverley 'was listening to Prince on my Walkman and they didn't have a clue! You could write any label you wanted on those old cassettes, couldn't you?'
As an adolescent, Knight was inspired by the way Prince's music transcended the genres traditionally prescribed to black people. 'He was exploratory, on an adventure with Lovesexy and Sign o' the Times. My mum and dad hated the posters I had up in my room. But he was teaching me to think outside of the box and I will always be grateful to him for that.'
Knight got her first record deal in 1994, making three critically-acclaimed albums and scoring hits with Shoulda Woulda Coulda (2002) and Come as You Are (2004), but, despite comparisons to Whitney Houston, never achieved superstardom, partially because of her insistence on performing on her own terms. As a self-defined 'square peg in a round hole', she refused to adopt the sexualised image of a pop star, but neither would she toe the gospel line. Having only drunk alcohol once (accidentally) in her life and abstaining from drugs, she was never a party girl and of little interest to the tabloids. Some heavyweight musical insiders always championed her, though. Gary Barlow and Jools Holland are long-term fans and, after she left her record label in 2007, her childhood hero Prince stepped in to invite her on tour with him.
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Did her parents see her music as ungodly? 'Yes, ultimately,' she winces. 'Because it's not explicitly Christian music. But I think they now understand that I'm not peddling things that are harmful. They know what I'm doing is not to the detriment of society. I've not 'backslidden'!'
Knight's pyrotechnic vocals have been exploding from West End stages since she took the lead in The Bodyguard musical (based on the 1992 Whitney Houston film) in 2013. She's since starred in Cats, Sister Act, The Drifters Girl and, in 2023, Sylvia, a musical about the suffragette movement for which she won an Olivier award.
Today, she tells me it's more important than ever to see 'black women, people of all types' on our stages as President Trump pushes on with his 'horrendous' reversal of diversity, equity and inclusion policies in the US. 'We are in the 21st century and a lot of progress is being rolled back,' she says as she carries our mugs to the sink and begins washing up. 'It is terrifying that they are defunding libraries and museums. They are trying to erase history and that is so scary.'
For example, she says, the US government is 'trying to pretend that Medgar Evers did not serve in the military'. (Last month, a section dedicated to 'Notable African American Graves', featuring Evers, the civil-rights activist, among others, was removed from the Arlington National Cemetery website.) She's cross again now. 'Those people would also like to erase the maverick story of Sister Rosetta Tharpe from our history. But many of us are pushing back.' She points out that Amazon is developing Rosetta, a film in which the pop star Lizzo will play Tharpe. 'We have to keep the truth alive and rockin',' she says. 'And we have to be fearless about that.'
Marie and Rosetta is at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames (rosetheatre.org), from Fri-May 24, then touring to Wolverhampton and Chichester
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