![]() Rosetta's favorite co-star brushed Rosetta's hair and painted Rosetta face for the funeral. Sweet Marie Knight was not afraid of her friend's dead body. I'm reporting it.Īnd I'm reporting this: Soon after she lost her leg to complications of diabetes, Rosetta was dead. ![]() I love her song 'Trouble In Mind.'" That gets said. How many women have said some version of this to me about Sister Rosetta? "The sun returned to my backdoor on the growl in her voice, chasing out the trouble in my mind." Or, that after she was diagnosed with "the sugar," diabetes, and appeared on stage in a wheel chair following a circa 1970 amputation, they had whispered, "Lord, didn't I cry when they cut off her leg. If the details of my trauma are no longer relevant, and the details are no longer relevant, some of the thanks goes to Rosetta. I was as materially privileged a brown daughter as a 20th century Negro could be. ![]() What she did for those women worked for me in very different circumstances. She played for those who got left back South, for 20th century cotton pickers and house maids, women who had nothing but a church and a radio when they woke up in the morning with the task of making a sane day. She started singing in a church in Chicago, she played in Detroit, but the autoworkers and the urban numbers players were not her cornerstone. Rosetta, she never forgot the southern rural audience. I was still building sane every day, but now I didn't just have Rosetta's voice I the sight of her, of her hands playing her guitar, her unashamed sweat, but best, her audacious sound that carried me back to passion when I was quit of it, a hundred different times. As I got older and YouTube was invented, I got to see Rosetta's "This Train" gestures, with my own eyes. On a bridge called Rosetta's voice I moved from trauma to transcendence. To be clean was to own one's complexity and contradictions and wrap them in the performance of sensual beauty. Rosetta was the train and she had had good and bad in her. Sin is not pleasure it's lying about identity. Rosetta train is a clean train because it is true, because it is authentic, because it hauls everybody but the liars, false pretenders, and back biters. ![]() They bought hi-fis, singles and albums, and they frequented the showbars and concerts, and they had told me that Rosetta winked while singing the train doesn't pull winkers mimed shooting crap while singing it didn't pull crap shooters mimed throwing back a shot of whisky just before or after singing it didn't pull whiskey drinkers pushed her tongue into the side of her cheek just after singing,"this train don't pull tobacco chewers." It was a joke even a kid could get with her family exuberantly describing the gestures, how Rosetta joked all the way through the chorus while singing the train didn't pull jokers.īy the end of the song we know Rosetta's train is a "her" and it a clean train but not the way most folks define clean. After a riveting guitar break she follows the true list with a false list. After telling us that the train is bound for glory she makes a true list of who can't ride the train: liars, false pretenders, backbiters. "This train is a clean train," the first line of my favorite Rosetta Tharp song, seems simple but it isn't. And she came riding a song called "This Train." And the second to last thing I would remember would be a little portable record player and Rosetta Tharp, gospel's first superstar, coming for to save me when I thought no one was coming. If I started to lose my memory and I lost the most precious truth last, the final thing I would remember is I love my daughter. Over the years there is one psyche work song I have come to love more than all the others. "Lord help me make another day." I prayed that prayer and God sent me the memory of Rosetta Tharpe's voice and then a Sister Rosetta Tharp album.Īfter great trauma sane is something you rebuild on the daily. My theology kept me soul-safe, if not body safe. I knew that even if Maddox chopped off the brown girl's head, seconds later she would be in heaven on a cloud drinking milk and honey at the welcome table telling Black King Jesus just what Lester Maddox did. I knew my mother, the policeman and Lester Maddox were all headed to the fiery pits of hell, where they would drink burning lava, and scream as their throats were scorched.
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