Saturday Night Fish Fry

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The tune is new to me, but Rosetta Tharpe and Lucky Millinder sure ain't.



"Now he's my king / he makes me sing / four or five times."

Rosetta Tharpe, usually referred to with the prefix name "Sister," spent most of her career shouting gospel over her own guitar accompaniment. The Wikipedia writeup refers to it as "early rock and roll" guitar, but she was playing this style as early as the 19 fucking '30s! You have to hear it to believe it. Either she invented it, or one of her direct influences did. (The Wikipedia article seems poorly edited, incomplete, and lacking focus, so don't take it as the "gospel" truth nyuk nyuk nyuk BONK d'0h! So I'm writing some of this purely from a partially faulty memory.)

Anyway, Sister Tharpe brought her manic gospel shouting style to popular music early in the Big Band era, and I believe most of her recorded performances were with Lucky Millinder's band. In this setting she sang purely secular songs, or tunes that might be interpreted as either secular or sacred (like the Staples Singers did decades later). It should also be noted that Sister Tharpe was quite a showboat even in gospel settings, and her third marriage was sanctified in front of 25,000 paying customers at Griffith Stadium in Washington, DC, 1951. That ceremony was followed, of course, by a gospel set for the crowd.

Lucky Millinder is one of my favorite big band leaders. He wasn't an artist with a capital A like Ellington, and he didn't create a whole new jazz-blues sound like Basie, but he was everywhere for a time, backing up big-name vocalists (in the "race music" industry) like Tharpe, Wynonie Harris, Bull Moose Jackson, and others. Millinder and his ensembles provided dance music and entertainment without lofty artistic pretensions. The charts popped, the bands swung with the best, and everything (to my ears) always sounded tight and ultra-professional.