The Godmother of Soul (Oxford American)
She traveled the world and left it scorched with her fearlessness and musical originality, inspired fierce devotion from an audience who thrilled to her enormous gifts and her personal excesses, and shook the celestial rafters with the force of her artistic character. ... she wielded her guitar like a weapon and distorted the sound: a guitar technique that was completely original at the time and would be copied by legions of rock guitarists in the decades after. Her voice was like a freight train in its power and a poem in its expressiveness. A woman playing guitar, singing spiritual songs in nightclubs that harbored all manner of vice, was unprecedented. Gospel singers just didn’t “cross over” to secular music. You were one or the other. She did it anyway, and Black churchgoers, the devoted core of her original audience, were shocked by her nightclub appearances, and shunned her. More than a decade later, mixing secular and spiritual music was still so unacceptable that the great Sam Cooke recorded his first pop song under an alias, in order not to alienate his gospel fan base. (...)She “played guitar like a man,” people told her, as a compliment. Dozens of musicians and performers credit her as a major influence, from Chuck Berry to Elvis to Keith Richards to my dad, who must have felt as if a spell had been cast on him as he sat glued to his family’s battery-powered radio and heard her voice pierce the gloaming over the cotton fields. The Black churchgoers eventually forgave her and found their way back into her audience. In 1998, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp to honor her, and then in 2017, forty-four years after her death, she was elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
[ed. See also: some amazing solos.]
