Writer-illustrator Charnelle Pinkney Barlow’s Little Rosetta and the Speaking Guitar: The Musical Story of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Lady Who Invented Rock and Roll is a superbly written and impressively illustrated image e-book that’s as jubilant as Tharpe’s music and can absolutely encourage readers to hunt out her joyful recordings.
The e-book focuses on Tharpe’s childhood, when the girl who would someday be known as the Godmother of Rock ’n’ Roll was a lady with a ardour and expertise for telling tales by means of music. Tharpe’s first guitar was a present from her mom, and he or she discovered musical inspiration throughout her hometown of Cotton Plant, Arkansas. Pinkney Barlow’s literary prowess is on full show as her prose sings out with fantastic rhythm and imagery. As Tharpe turns into a talented guitar participant, “her fingers [hop] round like corn in a kettle,” and when Tharpe performs in church for the primary time, her music is “like summer season rain washing the mud off a brand new day.”
It’s troublesome to convey the intricate appeal of Pinkney Barlow’s gleeful cut-paper art work. Textured and patterned papers create motion and depth, whereas colourful musical notations and bits of sheet music are integrated all through. Maybe most spectacular is the sense of place achieved by each textual content and artwork: Readers will really really feel as if they’ve visited Cotton Plant and met lots of its animated, expressive denizens, from Pastor Murray, “mender of souls and mender of guitars,” whose shirt is constructed from blue-lined pocket book paper, to Miss Mable, who compliments Tharpe’s “quick finger pickin’” as she hangs her laundry out to dry.
Little Rosetta and the Speaking Guitar is a worthy tribute not solely to Tharpe’s proud, triumphant sound but in addition to Pinkney Barlow’s grandfather, the late Caldecott Medal-winning author-illustrator Jerry Pinkney, to whom the e-book is devoted. In her creator’s word, Pinkney Barlow discusses the boundaries Tharpe confronted as a feminine guitarist in a male-dominated trade, as a gospel musician who performed in decidedly secular venues and as a Black musician in a segregated nation. The word additionally discusses Tharpe’s legacy and long-overdue induction into the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame.
To activate a radio at this time is to listen to Tharpe’s affect. Little Rosetta and the Speaking Guitar honors a girl whose sound lives on in our musical DNA.
