The Misogynoir of Rock: Shredding While Black and Female

The electric guitarist takes a wistful look upward, fluttering fingers in split second repose, beckoning the audience, bodies smashed together in the darkness in sweaty anticipation. It’s Rosetta Tharpe at a seventies gig, snapshot of a rare, unguarded moment in a storied career. The picture asks what it was like to navigate those waters, an anomaly in the tight white fraternity of touring rock musicians, a secularized traitor in the ossified world of Pentecostal gospel, a restless, Elvis-influencing blues shredder and a bisexual artist whose most enduring relationship was with another African American woman singer. Tharpe’s photo gaze seems to foreshadow the bittersweet end of her career, during a period in which she received a new surge of white adulation memorialized in a 1971 performance at a British railway station.

Tharpe’s influence and brilliance have been spotlighted in a recent documentary, biography and stage play. She’s become the flavor of the month for white hipster excavators of proto-feminist rock icons. Inheriting Tharpe’s mantle, contemporary black women rock guitarists like Malina Moye, Brittany Howard and Diamond Rowe are blazing ahead in the music industry. Black women rock critics are also busting past the white male gatekeepers of rock criticism. But decades after Tharpe’s death, black women musicians still struggle for visibility in the genre she helped invent. It’s a genre that has receded as the countercultural engine which spawned the aptly dubbed British Invasion and captivated legions of axe-slinging white Americans obsessed with electric guitar.

Bound by blacker-than-thou identity politics, respectable black women have always been warned to beware of such musical apostasy. Why would “real sistas” want to listen to, much less play, that “white boy music”? Why would a genre so antithetical to black identity and cultural production be appealing to black women who should rightfully be enthralled with soul, R&B, rap and hip hop; true markers of authentic blackness?

In ninth grade I asked a white male teacher who I’d seen playing guitar at a recital at my Catholic school for advice. I was a rock geek interested in getting my own instrument but knew nothing about where to start and I wasn’t familiar with any black women or girls who played. In the eighties my best friend Heather and I pined to start a rock band, but there were simply no visible models. We didn’t identify with any of the hetero-normative white women rockers who were being slobbered over in the mainstream and we were unfamiliar with Tharpe, Memphis Minnie or even Joan Armatrading. The teacher ….

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