Not many academics get to see their work under the lights of the stage. But that’s exactly what happened to Gail F. Wald of George Washington University—which, if you ask her, is a testament to the vitality of the woman in his heart. Blues rock pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe is too compelling not to be the main character.
“She’s over the top, she’s flamboyant, and she’s unapologetic,” said Wald, a professor of English and American studies at Columbia’s College of Arts and Sciences.
“Shout Sister Shout!”, playing through May 13 at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., is a musical adaptation of “Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock and Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.” Published in 2007, it was the first biography of Tharp, whose gospel background and signature electric style directly influenced popular music stars such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Isaac Hayes, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bonnie Raitt.
“What Gail’s book does so beautifully is it gives you a context for Rosetta’s life in terms of history and what else was going on during those times,” said Cheryl L. West, the playwright who adapted Shout, Sister, Shout” for the stage.
For decades, Tharpe was all but forgotten by the popular culture she helped shape. But among her fans, she was always well remembered. In his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech in 1992, Cash remembered Tharp as one of his earliest heroes. Chuck Berry, sometimes called the “Father of Rock and Roll,” is said to have called his entire career “one long Rosetta Tharpe impersonation.”
Yet in the 1990s, when Wald first saw a video of Tharpe, she was amazed at the paucity of information available about the woman whose performance stood out so strongly to her.
“How could this guy not be on my radar?” Wald remembered wondering. As a scholar of American music, she was at least aware of most popular music stars with Tharp’s obvious star power and contemporary profile. But Tharpe herself was an enigma. Wald assumed there would be scholarship on her, but apart from a brief mention in the gospel stories, there was very little. If he wanted to read a biography of Tharp, Wald had to research and write it himself.
And Wald knew Tharp’s story was a story that needed to be told. “The moment I saw her, something in me understood,” she said.
“Shout, Sister, Shout” received critical acclaim and sparked a revival of interest in Tharp’s music and life. Born in Arkansas in 1915, Tharp developed her signature style as a child performer in Pentecostal churches and tent revivals throughout the South. When she later embarked on a secular career, the blues gospel of her youth still influenced her performances. While Tharpe’s popularity in the United States peaked in the 1940s, her star continued to rise abroad—especially in the United Kingdom, where she continued to tour successfully for many years. Yet by the time Shout, Sister, Shout was published, Tharp was buried in an unmarked grave in Philadelphia.
“So, so much has happened since then,” Wald said.
“Shout, Sister, Shout” helped raise Tharpe’s visibility, and she only needed exposure to become a mainstream icon as well as a niche one. In 2009, a headstone was finally erected over Tharp’s grave. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018. In online circles, she became the “weird black woman” [who] invented rock and roll. (In a 2020 article, Wald discussed “meming” Tharpe and her own struggles writing compellingly about Tharpe’s sexuality.) And in 2015, Broadway producer Randy Johnson approached Wald about the option Shout Sister Shout! for the stage.
Eventually, playwright West joined Johnson in developing the show. She had read Shout, Sister, Shout years earlier and thought Tharp’s story was a “fascinating idea for a musical.”
But with little direct information from Tharpe about her own inner life—no journal or diary, few personal interviews—the process of adaptation was necessarily imaginary. West draws from her own experience as a black woman and artist, extrapolated into the world Tharp inhabits. “My job as a playwright is to find an emotional story, an emotional context and a story arc,” she said. “What would it be like to travel in her shoes and be an artist at that time? What might she have felt going through some of the challenges, the conflicts as well as the joys?’
For her part, Wald was struck by the iterative, collaborative process of building a musical. Although she wasn’t directly involved, only making herself available to answer questions from the theater crew, she enjoyed watching the story-driven, imaginative process by which actors, writers, directors, and musicians created “behind-the-scenes” moments for the Tharp Hero. West’s script explores, for example, whether Tharpe’s slight speech affects might be an Arkansas-raised woman’s attempts to fit in by emulating the East Coast clip she’d hear on the radio.
“As a biographer, I had certain safeguards,” Wald said. “So to see this creative agency applied to her was so exciting and fun.”
The show premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse in California in 2017, was reworked for the Seattle Rep production in 2019, and was put on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic before coming to the Ford this month.
Seeing Tharp come to life on stage is “kind of like an out-of-body experience” for Wald. She’s played by Carrie Comper, a performer the Washington Post called “electrifying” who first played Tharpe in Seattle.
Compere is “just a phenomenon,” Wald said. “It doesn’t impress, it’s not overdetermined, but it evokes [Tharpe] in the way he carries himself, in the way he holds a guitar.
Most of all, Wald said, she’s glad to see Tharp’s life and art celebrated. Beacon Press published a new edition of “Shout, Sister, Shout” in January, revealed by pop superstar Lizzo. Tharpe appears as a character in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic Elvis, a high-profile pop culture promotion that would have been unthinkable two decades ago.
“I have a friend who teaches a course on the history of rock and roll, and I guess her students were introduced to Rosetta Tharpe early on, so now every time they read almost anything written about rock music from before 2020, they’re like ” Dude, where’s Rosetta at?” Wald said, laughing. “Knowing her influences the stories we tell about American music.”
“Shout Sister Shout!” runs at the Ford Theater through May 13. Visit www.fords.org for tickets.