How Race Records Shook the World of Popular Music
The effect R&B had on British youth culture and its musical development
James Jordan’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock and Roll Can Inspire Your Writing, caused me to reflect how the influence of Black R&B inspired not just me, but a whole generation of young kids growing up in Great Britain and Europe in the 1950s.
Its effect unleashed a string of budding guitarists in the UK, like Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, and Eric Clapton, leading to a British musical invasion of America in the early 1960s taking the music back home to its roots.
I saw Sister Rosetta Tharpe on TV in England in the early 1960s and she blew everybody away with a kind of Gospel R&B not seen or heard before in the UK. It was a revelation.
Recently watching YouTube footage of her performing on a rain-soaked railway station platform in Chorlton, Manchester, I realised I’d never seen a woman play guitar that well.
Here was a woman old enough to be my Grandmother, giving a solid-bodied electric guitar such a beating. And sing? What a voice! I was hooked and so was the audience, made up of what looks like young British fans. She had them in the palm of her hand, and she knew it.
