Walk of Fame

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was inducted into the Philadelphia Walk of Fame in 2017.

Alongside Willie Mae Ford Smith, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is widely acclaimed among the greatest Sanctified gospel singers of her generation; a flamboyant performer whose music often flirted with the blues and swing, she was also one of the most controversial talents of her day, shocking purists with her leap into the secular market — by playing nightclubs and theaters, she not only pushed spiritual music into the mainstream, but in the process also helped pioneer the rise of pop-gospel. Tharpe was born March 20, 1915 in Cotton Plant, AR; the daughter of Katie Bell Nubin, a traveling missionary and shouter in the classic gospel tradition known throughout the circuit as “Mother Bell,” she was a prodigy, mastering the guitar by the age of six. At the same time, she attended Holiness conventions alongside her mother, performing renditions of songs including “The Day Is Past and Gone” and “I Looked Down the Line.”

In time, the family relocated to Chicago, where Tharpe began honing her unique style; blessed with a resonant vibrato, both her vocal phrasing and guitar style drew heavy inspiration from the blues, and she further aligned herself with the secular world with a sense of showmanship and glamour unique among the gospel performers of her era. Signing to Decca in 1938, Tharpe became a virtual overnight sensation; her first records, among them Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Rock Me” and “This Train,” were smash hits, and quickly she was performing in the company of mainstream superstars including Cab Calloway and Benny Goodman. She led an almost schizophrenic existence, remaining in the good graces of her core audience by recording material like “Precious Lord,” “Beams of Heaven,” and “End of My Journey” while also appealing to her growing white audience by performing rearranged, uptempo spirituals including “Didn’t It Rain” and “Down by the Riverside.”

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Sister Rosetta Tharpe Walk of Fame Plaque

Cultural Heritage, Cultural Heritage Preservation

Café Society Swing

In 1987, Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 57 designating jazz “a rare and valuable national American treasure.” The resolution recognized jazz as a “unifying force, bridging cultural, religious, ethnic and age differences.” Indeed, jazz played an important role in paving the way for the Civil Rights Movement.

The Downbeat, located at 11th and Ludlow streets in Philadelphia, was the first racially integrated club in Center City. The building is still there.

Café Society Swing, written by Alex Webb, tells the story of the legendary Café Society, the first integrated nightclub in New York City. The jazz spot played host to, among others, Fats Navarro, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughn, Lena Horne, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ida Cox and Big Joe Turner. Philly Joe Jones was the house drummer.

The Café Society is where Billie Holiday first sang “Strange Fruit” in January 1939.

Philly’s Café Society was located on “The Golden Strip.”

Advocacy

Nina Simone Netflix Documentary

Later this year, Netflix will debut an original documentary about Nina Simone, What Happened, Miss Simone? The film was screened at the Sundance Film Festival.

Rolling Stone reports:

Beginning with footage of the singer staring down an audience at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, What Happened goes about answering its question by flipping back to Simone’s childhood, detailing her early musical ambitions to be the first black female classical pianist. Despite her talent and the financial support of well-to-do patrons, she was rejected by the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia; that “early jolt of racism,” as Simone referred to the incident, became the first of several events to fuel an inexhaustible supply of anger at society. A summer gig at an Atlantic City bar gave birth to the blues chanteuse she’d eventually become, with the film tracing her rise to hit recording artist, jazz sensation, long-suffering wife (her manager/husband Andrew Stroud does not come off well), a major player in the Civil Rights movement, industry pariah, American ex-pat, playing-for-chump-change café performer and, eventually, a rediscovered legend.

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Green Book

Downstairs at the Showboat

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The legendary Showboat was located in the basement of the Douglass Hotel. The historical marker out front notes that Billie Holiday “often lived here.”

Billie Holiday Marker

A while back, I visited what used to be the Showboat with Yasuhiro “Fuji” Fujioka, founder of the Coltrane House of Osaka and co-author of “The John Coltrane Reference”; Lenora Early, founder of the Philadelphia John Coltrane House; and Dr. George E. Allen, author of “I Was Not Asked.”

Until that visit, I assumed the Showboat was in the lower level space with the two windows facing Lombard Street. As we descended the stairs, Dr. Allen said something was wrong. Back then, there was no landing between the steps. Instead, the club was down a steep set of stairs. And sure enough, after a bit of snooping, we found what remains of the original steps that led down to the Showboat.

Stairs 1

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So imagine the likes of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderley, Bootsie Barnes, Philly Joe Jones, Jimmy Heath, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington, Ray Charles and Ramsey Lewis descending those steps to take their place on the small bandstand behind the bar.

Showboat - John Coltrane - Live at the Showboat

The Douglass Hotel is a stop on the Green Book walking tour which will be held on Saturday, October 12, 2024, 10am to 12pm. Tickets are $25 per person.

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Cultural Heritage

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

There are some years that were so momentous just their mention evokes milestones. Think 1776 and 1964. Or 1965 and “Bloody Sunday,” a retelling of which, “Selma,” is now playing in theaters.

1959 was the year that changed jazz. That year marked the release of Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” Ornette Coleman’s “Shape of Jazz to Come” and Dave Brubeck’s “Time Out.”

Advocacy

Is Jazz Healthy?

The Jazz Connect Conference, organized by JazzTimes and the Jazz Forward Coalition, was held January 8-9, 2015, in New York City and led into the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference, as well as Winter Jazzfest. The Jazz Connect Conference featured a series of workshops, panels discussions, and keynote address by Philly-native Christian McBride.

Jazz Venues

South Street

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In the 1920s, jazz became the soundtrack for the revolution in manners and morals that was sweeping the nation. In New York’s Harlem, South Philadelphia, the south side of Chicago, Pittsburgh’s Hill District and other northern cities urban African Americans, known as the New Negroes, were finding expanded opportunities and new identities. One of the first singers to give voice to this new generation was Chester, Pennsylvania’s Ethel Waters, the first recording star of the African-American-owned Black Swan Record Company.

In the African-American-owned Standard Theatre on South Street, Waters, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and other jazz and blues stars performed their music for black and white audiences. The Standard and Dunbar were stops on a circuit of African-American theaters that brought the best of black touring shows to their cities.

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Jazz Venues, Lee Morgan

The Golden Strip

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The “Golden Strip” spanned Columbia Avenue from 8th Street to 23rd Street. With neon signs aglow, it was also known as the “Great White Way.” Noted author and hip-hop scholar James G. Spady wrote:

The biggest concentration of bars and clubs frequented by blacks and offering Jazz was along Columbia Avenue (later renamed Cecil B. Moore Avenue). Among what as upwards of fifteen different venues were the Crystal Ball, 820 Club, Spider Kelly’s, Watts Zanzibar — one of the few black owned venues—and the North West Club. [Lee] Morgan played at many of these with groups made up of his peers. The trumpeter Cullen Knight remembered seeing Morgan at the North West, leading a band consisting of tenor saxophonist Odean Pope and a rhythm section of McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman and Ronald Tucker.

Both the Zanzibar and North West were private clubs, and these were often keener to employ, under-age musicians than other venues; in addition, removed from some off the commercial concerns of the regular bars, they were thought of as sites for some degree of experiment among young musicians, as ‘hardcore’ bebop clubs where players could cultivate their jazz improvisation without needing to make concessions to dancers or casual listeners. Private venues would often pay the musicians a decent nightly fee, often around $10.

In Whisper Not: The Autobiography of Benny Golson, the NEA Jazz Master recalled his days on the Golden Strip with John Coltrane:

On jam days—Saturday afternoons between four and seven—John and I started at one end of Columbia Avenue, where most of the clubs were located, and proceeded toward the other end. We played at each club for an hour, then moved to the next. If we didn’t get to a particular club, we started there the following week. These clubs were small, on the ground floor of apartment houses or in storefront slots, long and narrow.

Published by Temple University Press, Golson’s autobiography is available for purchase here.