How One Of Music's Biggest Stars Almost Disappeared, And How Her Legacy Was Saved

How does one of the biggest stars in American popular music go missing?

Not physically, of course; despite lying in an unmarked grave for more than three decades after her death, it's not difficult to locate Sister Rosetta Tharpe today. And during her lifetime, Tharpe was unmissable. As a gospel star in the late 1930s and '40s, she played at New York hotspots like the Cotton Club, the Apollo Theater and Cafe Society. She toured the country, then the world: In the late '40s, on the road with The Dixie Hummingbirds, she broke records across the American South; in the '60s, she met a new generation of adoring fans across the Atlantic. Tharpe was a gospel singer, but she didn't obey the sacred/secular divide. She fronted Count Basie's band and jammed with Duke Ellington; her 1944 song "Strange Things Happening Every Day" crossed over to Billboard's "race" (known later as "R&B") charts and, in the '50s, she even cut a single with a country star. Her (third) marriage was staged in a baseball stadium to an audience of paying fans who numbered in the tens of thousands. She was glamorous, she was charming and she played the guitar like no one else.

But for decades after her career ended, Tharpe was largely absent from popular consciousness. She hasn't been portrayed by Hollywood actresses in big-budget movies, the way Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday have. Though Johnny Cash, Keith Richards and Bob Dylan all sang Tharpe's praises, their name recognition quickly surpassed hers. Since her death in 1973, there's been one biography of her published: Gayle Wald's groundbreaking in 2007. In it, Wald recounts how Tharpe asked a teenage Richard