Train Songs No. 7: ‘This Train’ by Sister Rosetta Tharpe

*I am re-posting this episode of Train Songs as the three clips didn’t open in some recipients’ emails. This time I have included alternative links that will work on a smart-phone. *

In previous posts we have seen songwriters use trains to represent many things: they can be a way of uniting people, or of separating them; an escape route or the agency by which you are left behind; a route to the future or a remnant of a vanishing past.

One of the earliest such tropes is of the train as a vehicle of spiritual deliverance, expressed nowhere more succinctly than in this song, first recorded in 1925 by Wood’s Blind Jubilee Singers and covered since by everyone from Woody Guthrie to Mumford and Sons, in whose hands it becomes a suburban-hillbilly singalong. To Sister Rosetta Tharpe This Train signified something rather different.

Originally from Mississippi, Tharpe was raised in Chicago where she began singing and performing in church at six years old. By the time she was 30 she had become a genuine superstar, her vocal and guitar styles influencing rock and roll performers including Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. In this clip she is playing to a predominantly white, seated audience, as she increasingly did in the latter half of her career, and she hams it up a little for the camera, the sweat rolling down from beneath her blond wig.

This train is a clean train, this train…. 

What does a potential passenger have to sign up to, to be considered clean? Rosetta elaborates. Heaven does not admit winkers, jokers, crap-shooters, cigar-smokers, tobacco-chewers, liars, back-biters or whisky-drinkers. The train may be  bound for glory, but it won’t pull such people, so there is no use their queueing for a ticket. The list of sins enumerated is straight out of the rule-book of the COGIC (Church of God in Christ) Temple Rosetta attended in Chicago as a child, with its emphasis on holiness and physical purity. These are the values she still aspired to, despite a string of broken marriages and a love affair with fellow gospel singer Marie Knight which was an open secret in the music business.

As she reaches the guitar break she backs away from the mike and looks up to the ceiling, a trademark gospel trick that made her early audiences feel she was in direct communication with a higher power. On this occasion her solo is restrained, thoughtful but note-perfect, her train’s progress towards glory unhurried but unstoppable. Rosetta was one of the first performers to tour the United States, along with her band and her backing singers, the Rosettes, in a bus with her name on the side of it. This was not mere showbiz pazzaz; playing to packed theatres, her band could not get served in restaurants or lodged in motels in many parts of segregated America, so the bus was fitted out with sleeping quarters. When she spoke of a need for deliverance, she knew of what she sang.

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In 1963, Granada Television in the UK set up a tour featuring a number of performers including Rosetta, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Terry and Brownie McGhee, their progress filmed for a TV feature. Aged 49, on a cold, wet British afternoon, Rosetta Tharpe found herself in a disused railway station outside Manchester, performing to an audience of English beatniks and students located on the other side of the tracks. Undeterred by the metaphorical import of this situation she turned in a regal performance, the British television audience treated to the unfamiliar sight of a middle-aged African-American woman sporting an elegant coat and a Gibson guitar effortlessly dominating a windswept railway platform. The clip features a number of performances from the film, including Rosetta’s, around thirteen minutes in.

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Finally, if you want to see Ms Tharpe and her guitar really rock, check out this clip — her portable amp, positioned in front of the backing choir,  is cranked right up and she lets rip on the solo. A real Christmas Cracker.

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