CD - Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Live in France: The 1966 Concert in Limoges

1CD - IMPORT - Limited

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was such a beautiful light and for her to have such faith in her music and her spirit and no doubt to see a lot of darkness, there's a lot to be learned from that. I think there's a lot to learn from an artist like her who started doing it at five or six years old and then did it throughout her whole career and really had a passion for it. She just had a God-given gift.

– Susan Tedeschi

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a pivotal figure in American 20th century music, though until recently her legend had languished in semi-obscurity. The pioneering gospel/blues singer, extraordinarily gifted electric guitarist and proto rock ‘n’ roll star has been rediscovered of late with a well-deserved induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018 with Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard doing the honors. Thereafter, her influence at the dawn of the rock era on none other than Elvis Presley was acknowledged with a searing portrayal by Yola in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 Elvis feature film. All of that posthumous notoriety has earned her the title “The Godmother of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” with her undeniable influence acknowledged by rock cognoscenti everywhere. 

The 1966 Concert in Limoges, is a 21-track album of newly discovered and previously unreleased performances recorded on November 11, 1966, at the Grand Theater in Limoges, the city in west-central France best known for porcelain production. Having been accepted and celebrated by audiences in France and throughout Europe, she toured the continent relentlessly in the ‘60s.

Her 1966 performance in Limoges was in fact her third concert there over the years. It was captured on tape that night by the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF) and discovered seven years ago by Zev Feldman, the archivist Stereophile dubbed “The Indiana Jones of Jazz,” and who was recently profiled in The New Yorker, for his uncanny ability to uncover heretofore “lost” music recorded decades ago by seminal and critically acclaimed artists.

Feldman found the Limoges recording while doing a search of the INA (Institut national de l’audiovisuel) France archives and realized he had discovered something very special: an audio document of the formidable American gospel great playing solo, accompanying herself on her electric guitar. Feldman commented, "Sister Rosetta Tharpe has been a towering and trailblazing figure in music even decades and decades after her passing in 1973, and her influence is still being felt to this day. This recording has never been released before and I consider it a very special time capsule of a document that transports you back to a wonderful performance in the mid-1960s in France."