Sister Rosetta Tharpe was combining gospel singing with amplified electric guitar long before rock and roll had settled into a recognisable genre.
By the late 1930s she was already performing outside the church circuit, and her guitar playing eventually became one of the clearest bridges between gospel, rhythm and blues and the music that would later be called rock.
The remarkable part is not simply that she was early.
Listen to the physical attitude of the playing.
The guitar is not background accompaniment.
It answers the voice.
It pushes rhythm forward.
It distorts.
It becomes theatrical.
This is behaviour we now associate automatically with rock guitar.
Historical categories can hide relationships because we name music after the fact. Once “rock and roll” exists as a category, it becomes tempting to search for its beginning only among musicians already labelled as rock musicians.
Tharpe makes that impossible.
She was working inside gospel while producing gestures another generation would recognise as rock.
That is a useful reminder that genres rarely begin on the day somebody gives them a name.
The sound usually exists first.
History catches up afterwards.
