Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Sister Rosetta Tharpe began performing gospel music as a young child alongside her mother, a travelling evangelist, and had already built a reputation as a guitar prodigy by her teenage years. By the late 1930s she was recording for a major label and performing in nightclubs, a controversial crossover for a gospel singer at the time.

Tharpe's playing style fused the fervour of gospel singing with an electrifying, distorted electric guitar technique years ahead of its time, directly influencing the sound that would become rock and roll. Her 1944 recording of "Strange Things Happening Every Day" is frequently cited by music historians as one of the first rock and roll records, predating Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry by nearly a decade.

She toured relentlessly through segregated America, often performing for mixed-race audiences at a time when that alone was an act of defiance, and mentored a young Little Richard, who cited her as a formative influence. Though her contribution went largely uncredited for decades, she was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, finally cementing her place as a founding architect of the genre.