Author-illustrator Charnelle Pinkney Barlow’s Little Rosetta and the Talking Guitar: The Musical Story of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Woman Who Invented Rock and Roll is a superbly written and impressively illustrated image ebook that’s as jubilant as Tharpe’s music and will certainly encourage readers to hunt out her joyful recordings.
The ebook focuses on Tharpe’s childhood, when the girl who would at some point be known as the Godmother of Rock ’n’ Roll was a woman with a ardour and expertise for telling tales by way of music. Tharpe’s first guitar was a present from her mom, and 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 great rhythm and imagery. As Tharpe turns into a talented guitar participant, “her fingers [hop] around like corn in a kettle,” and when Tharpe performs in church for the first time, her music is “like summer rain washing the dust off a new day.”
It’s troublesome to convey the intricate allure of Pinkney Barlow’s gleeful cut-paper paintings. Textured and patterned papers create motion and depth, whereas colourful musical notations and bits of sheet music are integrated all through. Perhaps most spectacular is the sense of place achieved by each textual content and artwork: Readers will actually really feel as if they’ve visited Cotton Plant and met many 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 “fast finger pickin’” as she hangs her laundry out to dry.
Little Rosetta and the Talking Guitar is a worthy tribute not solely to Tharpe’s proud, triumphant sound but additionally to Pinkney Barlow’s grandfather, the late Caldecott Medal-winning author-illustrator Jerry Pinkney, to whom the ebook is devoted. In her writer’s notice, Pinkney Barlow discusses the boundaries Tharpe confronted as a feminine guitarist in a male-dominated business, as a gospel musician who performed in decidedly secular venues and as a Black musician in a segregated nation. The notice additionally discusses Tharpe’s legacy and long-overdue induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
To activate a radio right this moment is to listen to Tharpe’s affect. Little Rosetta and the Talking Guitar honors a girl whose sound lives on in our musical DNA.
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