By Sarah Byron
Jack Hamilton’s “How Rock and Roll Became White and how the Rolling Stones, a band in love with black music, helped lead the way to rock music’s segregated future” and Gayle Wald’s “Rosetta Tharpe and Feminist Unforgetting” both address the systematic erasing of influential black artists from music history’s memory. Hamilton writes about how white musicians and audiences rewrite the narrative of music, and in the case of rock and roll, praise bands like the Rolling Stones for creating the genre even though black musicians created rock and roll long before the Rolling Stones took the stage. Hamilton writes, “by far the most common way that the whitening of rock-and-roll music has been discussed is simply not at all,” highlighting how Rock and Roll die-hards have no interest in remembering who came before the Rolling Stones.
Wald’s piece of Rosetta Tharpe attempts to remember what has been forgotten by examining the use of biography to “un-forget”. Wald writes, “[biography] taught me that biography can be a crucial tool of ‘un-forgetting’: a process which, in the best cases, resists the totalizing and exclusionary strategies that have rendered a person invisible and un-accounted for.” The biography is Wald’s way of rewriting the past and bringing to light the memories and contributions of the incredible Rosette Tharpe, a musician that was removed from popular music’s history.
These videos showcase Rosetta Tharpe’s incredible talent. It’s clear to see why she was referred to as the “godmother of rock and roll”.
AFRAM337 