On May 7, 1964, a who’s who of future blues guitar luminaries – among them Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones – gathered, with a number of other excited blues fans, at the Wilbraham Road train station in south Manchester.
Clapton, Beck, and co. had journeyed to the out-of-use station all the way from London to see a show unlike any other – the Blues and Gospel Train.
Staged dramatically on the station’s platform – with the audience on one end of the tracks and the performers on another – and filmed for a Granada TV special, the show gathered together a mind-blowing lineup of blues giants: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Cousin Joe, Otis Spann, and the Reverend Gary Davis.
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Though all of the aforementioned blues legends brought their A-game, it was Tharpe – brought to the stage in style in a horse-drawn carriage – who completely stole the show.
Inspired by the downpour that had lashed the station shortly before her arrival, Tharpe decided to open her set with a ferocious rendition of the gospel standard, Didn’t It Rain.
Armed with her beloved, three-pickup 1961 Gibson Les Paul SG Custom, Tharpe treated those in attendance – and the estimated 10 million viewers who would later watch the broadcast at home – to a display of powerful, hard-driving blues guitar fire that was years ahead of its time.
You can draw direct lines, for instance, from Tharpe’s fluid but always in-the-pocket rhythm work to Richards’ later playing with the Rolling Stones, and hear the influence her lyrical slides would go on to have on Jones, already a huge fan of slide master Elmore James.
You can see Tharpe’s Didn’t It Rain performance above, and the full Blues and Gospel Train TV special below.
Tharpe’s performance has now been commemorated with a plaque at the Manchester Central Convention Complex – the former Manchester Central Railway Station – where Tharpe and those she shared the bill with boarded the train that took them to the Wilbraham Road station.
The plaque is part of a Manchester-based campaign by social historian and broadcaster Karen Gabay, to place plaques that honor Black musicians who influenced the city.
Of Tharpe, she told the BBC, “She was one cool sister; that swagger, that strut, the way she played the guitar – so many people who see it for the first time are instantly taken aback.”
Back in 2022, Lizzo guitarist Celisse and Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter/guitarist Amythyst Kiah staged – as part of Gibson’s Shout, Sister, Shout! mini-documentary on Tharpe – a tribute to the 1964 train station performance.
Wielding Custom Shop replicas of Tharpe’s 1961 Les Paul SG Custom, the duo put their own, unaccompanied spin on Didn’t It Rain, while retaining the spirit and passion of the original.
“She [Tharpe] entranced audiences and inspired untold numbers of blues-loving players from across the pond, people like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards,” Celisse says in the film. “There’s an endless list of artists that borrowed from Sister Rosetta – folks like Elvis, Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, even me!
“Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born to be on stage and channel her joy of faith through her powerful voice and volcanic playing. She took audiences to church and her male guitar playing contemporaries to school.
“While it’s taken decades to finally give her her due,” Celisse concludes, “there is no debating that Sister Rosetta Tharpe is the unquestioned founding mother of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Though popular and commercially successful in her day, Tharpe – who died in 1973, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Philadelphia – has only recently begun to receive recognition as one of the formative figures in blues and rock electric guitar playing.
In 2018, decades after many of the guitarists whose style she helped shape received the same honor, Tharpe was finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in the “Early Influences” category.
