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 hit ...