Rock, Rosetta, Rock! Roll, Rosetta, Roll!: Presenting Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Godmother of Rock & Roll
by Tonya Bolden; illus. by R. Gregory Christie
Primary    Harper/HarperCollins    40 pp.
2/23    9780062994387    $18.99

Rosetta Tharpe’s (1915–1973) music would influence some of the biggest stars of the twentieth century—from Chuck Berry and Little Richard to Johnny Cash and Aretha Franklin—and change the sound of American music forever. In a picture-book biography that takes Tharpe from childhood in Cotton Plant, Arkansas (“Little girl. Big guitar”), through her adult career, Bolden’s dynamic second-person text puts readers in Tharpe’s shoes. In tracing her musical successes, readers see her intermingling of musical genres (“mixing it up with Gospel’s Cousin Boogie-Woogie, Cousin Jazz, Cousin Swing, Cousin the big, bad Blues”) and with it the origin of rock and roll. Bolden describes Tharpe the performer as “bold, audacious—in a word, bodacious, whatever the song.” Christie’s acryla gouache paintings use bold contrasting colors to show Tharpe as the center of attention as well as the center of the action: singing, praying, duckwalking, and always with fingers flying on the guitar strings. He contrasts crisp angular lines (of industrial modernity—trains, spotlights, skylines) with elegant curves (of the guitar’s body, of human figures). A detailed timeline, a lengthy author’s note, and brief source notes round out this impressive offering about an often-overlooked figure in American music. Pair with Barlow’s Little Rosetta and Her Talking Guitar (rev. 1/23).

From the July/August 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.