In a New York nightclub in the late 1930s, a young Black queer woman stood on stage aggressively shredding an electric guitar, playing a loud, rhythmic music that did not yet have a name. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was building the sonic architecture of rock and roll a decade before the men who usually get the credit. This episode pulls the original blueprints back out, tracing how a child prodigy born Rosetta Nubin in 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, pushed spiritual music into the mainstream and laid the structural foundation for rhythm and blues and rock.

We start in the Church of God in Christ, where her mother Katie Bell Nubin was a traveling evangelist and mandolin player, and where ecstatic Pentecostal worship forced a six-year-old performer to be her own rhythm section and lead guitarist. We follow her 1938 move to New York, her Decca hits, appearances at the Cotton Club and Carnegie Hall’s Spirituals to Swing, and the fierce backlash from traditional gospel circles. We break down the 1944 session with boogie-woogie pianist Sammy Price that produced Strange Things Happening Every Day, a proto-distorted crossover hit historians often call the first rock and roll record. Then come her partnership with Marie Knight, the 25,000-ticket stadium wedding in 1951, a likely first interracial duet with Red Foley in 1952, and the rain-soaked 1964 Manchester railway station concert that schooled a generation of British guitarists including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Keith Richards.

• How Pentecostal tent revivals with no microphones forged her thumb-and-fingers electric attack
• Why her move into nightclubs was less a business gamble than a takeover of mainstream culture
• The Apollo guitar battles and the patronizing compliment that she could play like a man
• Her business savvy as a one-woman enterprise who owned property and trained her own backup group, the Rosettes
• Her influence on Little Richard, Johnny Cash, and Elvis, her 2018 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, and the ongoing revival led by great-niece Tiana Atkins