What if you were told that Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry all idolized the exact same person? What if that person was a queer Black woman who was plugging an electric guitar into primitive amplifiers and cranking the volume to get a heavy, gritty distortion in the 1930s—years before the men who supposedly invented rock and roll even dreamt of doing it? In this special story-driven biographical profile for the PeoplePod series, we trace the life of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the undeniable godmother of rock and roll, whose pioneering musical genius actively engineered a new genre only for her legacy to be nearly erased from the history she built.

Born Rosetta Newbin in Cotton Plant, Arkansas in 1915, her musical identity was forged in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), a Pentecostal denomination that uniquely encou ...