Sugar Ray Leonard vs Thomas Hearns 16 September 1981

Sugar Ray Leonard Vs Thomas Hearns - Boxing's Greats Duke It Out - The funniest videos clips are here

That Mushroom Cloud? They’re Just Svejking Around

One Sunday, several months ago, early risers gazing at Czech Television’s CT2 channel saw picturesque panoramas of the Czech countryside, broadcast to the wordless accompaniment of elevator music. It was the usual narcoleptic morning weather show.

Then came the nuclear blast.

Across the Krkonose Mountains, or so it appeared, a white flash was followed by the spectacle of a rising mushroom cloud. A Web address at the bottom of the screen said Ztohoven.com.

Ztohoven, to no one’s great surprise, turned out to be a collective of young artists and friends who had previously tinkered with a giant neon sculpture of a heart high atop Prague Castle, and managed (during a single night, no less) to insert announcements for an art opening inside all 750 lighted advertising boxes in the city’s subway system.

Now half a dozen members of the group face up to three years in jail or a fine or both, charged with scaremongering and attempted scaremongering. The trial is set for March. Some Czechs expressed outrage over Ztohoven’s action, naturally, but in general it drew a mild, tolerant, even amused public response, in contrast to how terrorism-related pranks, or what might seem like them, have been widely greeted elsewhere. The incident instead has highlighted an old Czech tradition of tomfoolery that is a particular matter of national cultural pride.

Not long ago a film that became a local hit, “Czech Dream,” documented a boondoggle by two young Czech filmmakers, who enlisted advertisers and publicists to devise a marketing scheme for a nonexistent supermarket. The movie’s goal, like Ztohoven’s, was to wag the dog: lampoon media manipulation and public gullibility. In the trailer hundreds of shoppers swarm a weedy field, rushing toward what they believe to be the store, which turns out to be a painted backdrop. The mushroom cloud, in a sense, upped the ante on the supermarket.

To hack into the CT2 broadcast, Ztohoven simply switched cables on an unmanned, remote camera at a limestone quarry in the mountains, which the artists had scouted three years earlier. Then they piped in their video. The name Ztohoven makes a pun in Czech that means both “out of it” and an obscenity. Rightly, the group presumed this would tip off viewers that the explosion was fake, in case they hadn’t already guessed it from the cheesy special effects.

Contrary to what the British press reported, no “War of the Worlds” panic ensued. So far as anyone can tell, not a single sleepy-eyed Czech viewer was frightened by the stunt, their lack of fear, the state attorney said, not being the explanation for the curious charge of “attempted” scaremongering. (The charge is a Czech legal fine point.)

As for exactly who the group’s members are, that remains something of a mystery, which Ztohoven theatrically guards. Even the state prosecutor said over the phone the other day it was private information until the trial. Nevertheless three members of the group — two amiable ringleaders and a quiet, sweet-faced 26-year-old who looked as if he were 12 — agreed to meet at an empty cafe over coffee and Coke. They declined to give their names. But they brought a film crew.

Turns out, Ztohoven includes no women. “That’s the problem of radicalism,” sighed the threesome’s 33-year-old elder statesman, who called himself Roman Tyc. (The pun works in English.) “To get together for pranks is also more difficult now that we’re getting into our 30s.”

His associate, in a pastel crewneck sweater, who gave his name as Zdenek Dostal, and whom the highly voluble Roman had a tendency to talk over, said the action on Czech Television, which Ztohoven titled “Media Reality,” was “not meant to be threatening but to land softly on the public consciousness so that people won’t let themselves be brainwashed.”

The artists just wanted to startle viewers “from their lethargy,” piped in the quietest member of the trio, Mira Slava (punningly, “peace and fame”). All three Ztohovenites recoiled at a description of an art project some years back entailing fake bombs left in a New York subway station, which briefly shut part of the city down.

Nothing really happened at all here, initially, anyway. Ladislav Sticha, the tall spokesman for Czech Television, told me that the show’s audience was “miniature” — presumably he meant small in number. Only a few people, among them perplexed hikers checking the weather before setting out for a Sunday stroll, called or sent e-mail messages to inquire.

But then Czech Television broadcast Ztohoven’s handiwork hour after hour on its numerous news programs, and the video soon landed on YouTube. By the next day all Europe knew about it.

“It’s not that we would not have supported this kind of art, if they had come to us,” Mr. Sticha added, somewhat abashed that, because Czech Television filed a complaint for breach of property, the affair ended up in court.

Hardly anyone here seems to want Ztohoven to receive more than a legal slap on the wrist, if that. Neither have fellow artists protested the trial in the streets, nor made a freedom of speech issue out of it. A literary weekly even mildly took Ztohoven to task for being a little too hungry for media attention.

On the other hand, the National Gallery in Prague last month awarded the group a prize. Milan Knizak, the National Gallery’s white-haired, pony-tailed director, himself an artist and one-time Czech Actionist, explained that the award was not a statement about the court case but given for the “directness” of “Media Reality.”

Back in the 1960s, Mr. Knizak added, he contrived to send hundreds of packages to a randomly chosen apartment building in Prague: “clothes, furniture, live fish, tickets to the movie theater.”

“No art was present” in that action, he went on. “It meant a change in the everyday life of everyday people. It didn’t take place in a gallery or museum, it just happened. Like love. You don’t reason why. It just is.”

Ztohoven’s work has a larger context, in other words. It belongs to a history of Czech literary and artistic mystification and sly, deadpan humor that is the expression of a small, underdog nation dominated for generations by outsiders, one after another. “The Good Soldier Svejk,” by Jaroslav Hasek, the famous Czech novel that is the masterpiece of this genre, tells of an idiot Candide, a hopeless orderly whose humanity throws into contrast a decaying empire.

“The Czech hero was no longer the nobleman but the poor, simple creature,” Mr. Knizak said about “Svejk,” “not Don Quixote but Sancho Panza.”

The book, it seems, even gave rise to a droll verb: “Because of the past, Austria, communism, fascism, someone always stepping on our necks, we have had no choice except to Svejk around,” Roman Tyc said about the general Czech psyche.

From Svejk’s example derived the fictional Jara da Cimrman, a kind of kitsch anti-Svejk, concocted by a group of writers and actors partly as a protest against authority during the communist era. In a country that claims no towering inventors or explorers, Cimrman became the quintessential Czech hero, a Zelig who trekked to the North Pole but missed it by several yards, who advised Chekhov, but failed to get credit. (“Two sisters?” he asked the Russian. “Isn’t that too few?”)

“It’s the difference between us and the Soviets,” Ladislav Smoljak, one of Cimrman’s creators, said one recent morning in his apartment, where an imitation Vermeer hung on the wall. “The oppression under which we lived was mostly mild so our reaction has been mild too. Mystification is a part of it.”

“Mystification is too strong a word,” Mr. Knizak, the gallery director, responded. “It’s more nebulous: important and unimportant at once, not aggressive, light, distant, not black humored. Czechs don’t start revolutions in the streets. We settle things over beer in pubs.”

Which, as it happened, was where Jiri Rak held forth the other night. A specialist in Czech smallness and a historian of culture, he summed up Ztohoven’s larger meaning in a neighborhood bar. “When people make fun of something, they are making themselves free of it,” he said. “That’s the condition of the small nation. It’s a defense for everyone today in the globalized world.

“I think the goal of Czech mystification is to show us that we live in a world continually mystifying us — the politicians, the advertisers.” He paused over his Pilsner, then raised the glass. “Thank God for Ztohoven.”

By Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times on 24 January, 2008

Mulatu Astatke

Mulatu Astatke is an Ethiopian musician and arranger. He is known as the father of Ethio-jazz. Born in 1943 in the western Ethiopian city of Jimma, Astatke was musically trained in London, New York City, and Boston, where he was the first African student at Berklee College of Music. He would later combine his jazz and Latin music influences with traditional Ethiopian music.

He has worked with many influential jazz artists such as Duke Ellington during the 1970s. After meeting the Massachusetts-based Either Orchestra in Addis Ababa in 2004, Mulatu began a collaboration with the band which continues today, with the most recent performances in Scandinavia in summer 2006.

In 2005, his music appeared on the soundtrack to the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers. Also, Volume 4 of the Ethiopiques series is devoted entirely to his music. He has recently released an album sold exclusively to passengers of Ethiopian Airlines. It is a 2-disc set, the first one being a compilation of the different styles from different regions of Ethiopia, and the second being studio originals. Astatke has recently been invited to play at Harvard university to display and lecture on his wide range of musical infuences.

'72 World Championship

Bobby Fischer, Troubled Genius of Chess, Dies at 64

Bobby Fischer, the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-bred genius who became one of the greatest chess players the world has ever seen, died Thursday in Reykjavik, Iceland. He was 64, and had for decades lived in obscurity, ultimately settling in Reykjavik after renouncing his American citizenship.

His death was confirmed Friday by Gardar Sverrisson, a close friend of Mr. Fischer’s. The cause was kidney failure, Mr. Sverrisson told wire services. Mr. Fischer was said to have been ill at home for some time before being admitted to the hospital on Wednesday.

Mr. Fischer was the most powerful American player in history, and the most enigmatic. After scaling the heights of fame, he all but dropped out of chess, losing money and friends and living under self-imposed exile in Budapest, Japan, possibly in the Philippines and Switzerland, and finally in Iceland, moving there in 2005 and becoming a citizen.

When he emerged now and then, it was sometimes on the radio, ranting in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and Jews. His rationality was questioned.

In 1992, he came out of a long seclusion for a $5 million rematch against his old nemesis, the Russian-born grandmaster Boris Spassky. The match, in Yugoslavia, commemorated the 20th anniversary of the two men’s monumental meeting in Reykjavik and Mr. Fischer’s most glorious triumph. Mr. Fischer won the rematch handily, but it was a sad reprise of their face-off in the summer of 1972.

In that earlier encounter, Mr. Fischer wrested the world championship from the elegant Mr. Spassky to become the first and, as yet, only American to win the title, one that Soviet-born players had held for more than four decades. It was the cold war fought with chess pieces in an out-of-the-way place.

Mr. Fischer won with such brilliance and dramatic flair that he became an unassailable representative of greatness in the world of competitive games, much as Babe Ruth had been and Michael Jordan would become.

“It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as aesthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity,” Harold C. Schonberg, who reported on the Reykjavik match for The New York Times, wrote in his 1973 book “Grandmasters of Chess.”

The rematch 20 years later drew no such plaudits. By participating, Mr. Fischer defied an American ban on conducting business in Yugoslavia as it waged war on Bosnia. After dispatching Mr. Spassky, Mr. Fischer dropped out of sight again, partly to avoid arrest on American charges stemming from his appearance. He stayed in touch with a dwindling number of friends in the United States by phone, compelling them to keep his secrets or risk his rejection.

In 2004, he was seized by the Japanese authorities when he tried to board a plane to Manila and accused of trying to leave the country on an invalid passport. He was detained in prison for nine months while the various governments and his supporters in the chess world tried to resolve the issue.

In 1999, in a series of telephone interviews with a radio station in the Philippines, he rambled angrily and profanely about an international Jewish conspiracy, which he said was bent on destroying him personally and the world generally.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio talk-show host in Baguio, the Philippines, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were “wonderful news.” He wished for a time, he said, “where the country will be taken over by the military, they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews and execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.”

Even in his years of triumph, Mr. Fischer was volatile and difficult. During the 1972 world championship match against Mr. Spassky, Mr. Fischer’s petulance, even loutishness, was the stuff of front page headlines all over the globe. Incensed by the conditions under which the match was to be played — he was particularly offended by the whir of television cameras in the hall — he lost the first game, then forfeited the second and insisted that the remaining games be played in an isolated room.

There, he roared back from what, in chess, is a sizable deficit, trouncing Mr. Spassky, 12 ½ to 8 ½. (In championship chess, a victory is worth one point for each player, a draw a half-point.) In all, Mr. Fischer won 7 games, lost 3 (including the forfeit) and drew 11.

Through July and most of August 1972, the attention of the world was riveted on the Spassky-Fischer match. Americans who didn’t know a Ruy Lopez from a Poisoned Pawn watched a hitherto unknown commentator named Shelby Lyman explain each game on public television.

All this was Mr. Fischer’s doing. Bobby Fischer — the rebel, the enfant terrible, the uncompromising savage of the chess board — had captured the imagination of the world. Because of him, for the first time in the United States, the game, with all its arcana and intimations of nerdiness, was cool. And when the championship match was over, he walked away with a winner’s purse of $250,000, a sum that staggered anyone associated with chess. When Mr. Spassky won the world championship, his prize had been $1,400.

Trouble With Celebrity

Mr. Fischer’s victory was widely seen as a symbolic triumph of democracy over communism, and it turned the new champion into an unlikely American hero. He was invited to the White House by President Richard M. Nixon, interviewed on television, wooed unsuccessfully by commercial interests. Sales of chess sets skyrocketed; so did fees for chess lessons.

But Mr. Fischer was incapable of sustaining himself in the limelight, and by the beginning of 1973, he had withdrawn into the weird, contrarian solitude he maintained more or less for the rest of his life. He turned down huge financial offers to play, among them a bid of $1.4 million from the Hilton Corporation to defend his title in Las Vegas. The dictator Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran offered even larger sums for matches in their countries. Mr. Fischer said the money was not enough.

At the same time, he tithed to the Worldwide Church of God, a fringe church he had become involved with beginning in the early 1960s. (He later abandoned it.) For a time, Mr. Fischer lived in Pasadena, Calif., the church’s home base, or in Los Angeles, where he was said to spend his time replaying chess games and reading Nazi literature. There were reports that he was destitute, though the state of his finances was never clear.

In chess circles, rumors surfaced intermittently that he was about to make a comeback. He invented a new kind of chess clock. He began railing to other chess players that computers had ruined the mystery of chess. He advocated a variation on the game in which pieces on the back rank, at the start, are lined up randomly.

A man of narrow interests but great intellectual gifts — he reportedly had an I.Q. of 181 — Mr. Fischer was a demanding personality (charismatic to some, merely infuriating to others) who seemed to feel that his prowess in chess entitled him to exorbitant privilege. He demanded loyalty from his supporters, concessions from his opponents, special treatment from tournament organizers and unalloyed respect from the world at large.

It was an outlook that became ever more skewed. In the end his self-involvement was his undoing, isolating him from all but the most obsequious chess-world worshipers.

Introduction to the Game

Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943. While his father was variously listed as Gerard, Gerhard or Gerhardt Fischer, a German-born physicist, there is also credible evidence that his father might have been a Hungarian émigré who worked in a naval research laboratory.

He and his wife, the former Regina Wender, divorced when Bobby was 2. Shortly thereafter, the elder Mr. Fischer left the United States for good, and Bobby and his older sister, Joan, were reared by their mother, a Swiss-born registered nurse and schoolteacher.

Regina Fischer moved her family first to California and then to Arizona before settling in a Brooklyn walkup, where Bobby grew up. The strong-willed Mrs. Fischer, who would become a forceful advocate of pacifist causes, had an uneven influence on her willful son. When he was a teenager, she tried to dissuade him from concentrating solely on chess. But she also helped raise money for him to compete in tournaments.

Mrs. Fischer was Jewish, and her son developed a hatred of Jews that became more virulent as he grew older. But mother and son evidently kept in touch over the years, and when she died in 1997, Mr. Fischer was said to have been distraught. His sister died soon afterward, and acquaintances of Mr. Fischer speculated that the two losses further taxed his fragile hold on rationality. He never married, but had a daughter, Jinky Ong, in 2000 with a companion, Justine Ong, in Manila. The child is his only immediate survivor.

It was his sister, Joan, who bought Bobby, then age 6, his first chess set and taught him the basic moves. By 8 he was taking lessons at the Brooklyn Chess Club; by 12 he was holding his own among America’s strongest players, who gathered at the Manhattan Chess Club and the Marshall Chess Club. His adult opponents called him “the Boy Robot” and “the Corduroy Killer,” for his unwavering wardrobe and insatiable will to win.

In 1956, when he was 13, Mr. Fischer became the youngest player ever to win the United States Junior Championship. The same year, at the Lessing J. Rosenwald Trophy Tournament, the most important invitational tournament in the country at the time, he created his first masterpiece in defeating the international master Donald Byrne. The Chess Review called it “The Game of the Century,” as it is still known today.

The next year he not only repeated as winner of the United States Junior Championship but also captured the first of his eight United States Championships, becoming at 14 the youngest person ever to hold the title. No less impressive was the manner of his victory — in 13 games against the best players in America, he had a score of 8 wins, 5 draws and no losses.

The next year he became, at 15, the youngest person until then to attain the rank of grandmaster, the game’s highest designation of skill. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, but, indifferent to classes because they took time away from chess, he dropped out at 16.

Aggressive, and ‘Brilliant’

At the chessboard he was renowned as a pitiless attacker. “I love to see them squirm,” he said of his opponents. From early on, he buttressed his penchant for original thinking with monumental study and he became known for his mastery of the game’s literature.

He favored strategies like the King’s Gambit, an opening maneuver in which White sacrifices a kingside pawn to get a quick attack. It had long been dismissed as too risky and romantic. But Mr. Fischer used it in spectacular fashion during the 1964 United States Championship in a game against the grandmaster Larry Evans. It was part of perhaps the greatest tournament performance ever, in which Mr. Fischer won 11 games, losing and drawing none. “He blew the chess world away,” said the chess teacher and writer Bruce Pandolfini.

The 1964 tournament also produced another of his legendary games, this one against the grandmaster Robert Byrne.

“It was one of his brilliant counterattacks,” recalled Mr. Byrne, who would go on to become the chess columnist for The New York Times. “He was playing Black, and he made a deep sacrifice, so deep that I did not understand it. It was a very profound combination, very beautiful.”

Mr. Byrne ended up resigning the game while he was still materially ahead. The result was so unusual that it confounded grandmasters analyzing the games for spectators.

Moving Beyond Eccentric

Mr. Fischer had always been brash, but by the early 1960s his self-regard had ballooned. He told Harper’s magazine that women could not be great chess players. Mr. Byrne recalled that at a tournament in Bulgaria in 1962 he suggested to Mr. Fischer that he see a psychiatrist. Mr. Fischer said a psychiatrist ought to pay him for the privilege of working on his brain.

He began making outlandish demands on tournament directors — for special lighting, special seating, special conditions to ensure quiet. He complained that opponents were trying to poison his food, that his hotel rooms were bugged, that Russians were colluding at tournaments and prearranging draws. He began to fear flying because he thought the Russians might hide booby traps on the plane.

He played less and less, withdrawing from competition for months at a time, fueling gossip that he was afraid to lose, but always returning to play at a level no one could equal. At one point, before the Spassky match in Reykjavik, he won 20 consecutive games against grandmasters. He also completed “My 60 Memorable Chess Games” (1969), a classic collection that remains required reading for serious players.

He earned his shot at the world champion, Mr. Spassky, when he soundly defeated another Russian, Tigran Petrosian. Now, in Reykjavik, Mr. Fischer had a world stage, and he seized the spotlight with his 6-foot-2 frame — broad-shouldered, angular and fit in bespoke suits — casting an imposing shadow.

He was imperious and, to some, insufferable. In the days before the match, he threatened to not show up and delayed his departure from New York. He insisted on television coverage, then refused to play for the cameras because he said he could hear them. He lost the first game on a blunder, then forfeited Game 2; then he threatened to withdraw entirely unless Mr. Spassky agreed to move play to a small room, away from the audience.

“He drove the organizers of the tournament to despair,” Fred Waitzkin wrote in “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” his 1988 book about the chess world, which became the basis for a 1993 movie.
In the end, though, Mr. Fischer was brilliant in Reykjavik, and when it was over, he was a legend: the American who beat the Russians at their own game.

During the match he had allowed a reporter for Life magazine, Brad Darrach, to spend time with him. Mr. Darrach produced a favorable article for the magazine but followed it with a biography, “Bobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World,” which portrayed Mr. Fischer as a monomaniac and a monster.

Mr. Fischer brought suit, and after a long battle, he lost. By then he had received a fresh blow from the chess establishment. The International Chess Federation (known by its French acronym as FIDE) stripped him of his title in 1975 when he refused to play the rightful challenger, Anatoly Karpov, under federation rules. His life had begun its downward spiral. After an unsuccessful lawsuit against members of the Worldwide Church, he was apparently broke and homeless.

“The rare accounts of his situation all mention cheap rooms in Pasadena and L.A., months of his crashing on former friends and days spent riding the orange city bus between L.A. and Pasadena, analyzing chess games on his pocket set,” Ivan Solotaroff wrote in Esquire magazine in 1992.

Chess players generally think that Mr. Fischer agreed to the 1992 Spassky match for the money. But the opportunity to reassert his primacy was apparently attractive as well. The games were played in a surreal atmosphere in Sveti Stefan, a resort in the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, just a few miles from the bloody warfare then raging in Bosnia. The $5 million purse was put up by a Serbian wheeler-dealer named Jezdimir Vasiljevic.

Although the match was unsanctioned, a banner was put up proclaiming it to be the world chess championship. At a press conference, Mr. Fischer held up a letter from the Treasury Department warning him that his participation in the match, considered an economic project, would constitute defiance of American sanctions against Yugoslavia. He would be subject to fine and arrest, he was told. In front of more than 150 reporters, he spat on the letter and ranted on against Jews and Russians.

Decades after Mr. Fischer faded into his oblivion, stories of Fischer sightings were traded as currency by chess players, and the debate — how would he have fared against Garry Kasparov, the great champion of the 1980s and 1990s? — echoed at tournaments and in chess publications.
“After 1972, we lost so many great pieces of art,” said Mr. Pandolfini, the chess teacher, “hundreds of masterpieces he would have created if he had stayed a sane being. We feel the great loss. All chess players do.”

Bruce Weber New York Times 19 January, 2008.

Graham Bowley also contributed reporting.

Martin Luther King in Memphis

Martin Luther's (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) last speech in Memphis before being assasinated on the balcony of the Hotel Lorraine the next day.

Can I Get an Amen?

In 1950, as the gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe was preparing for a guest performance on Perry Como’s television show, “The Chesterfield Supper Club,” she was instructed to climb into a horse-drawn wagon and sing “White Christmas” while simulating a country hayride. The Rosettes, her backing group, were told to wear bandannas. Tharpe objected to this latter indignity — not an easy thing to do for a veteran singer hungering for a large audience — and the Rosettes eventually performed without the demeaning bandannas. As Gayle F. Wald demonstrates in “Shout, Sister, Shout!,” a short, absorbing biography, this was just one of many instances in which the expectations of the entertainment industry and the aspirations of this genre-defying artist were painfully out of sync.

Though the success Rosetta Tharpe attained during her four-decade career was largely in gospel music, she is most admired for her feisty R&B guitar playing. Listen to a few piquant licks from her 1938 Decca recordings, and the sonic vernacular of rock ’n’ roll is sharply apparent. Yet, though her upbeat music and charismatic performance style attracted adherents like Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, Tharpe is only lately being accorded her rightful place in rock history.

The R&B charts of the 1940s attest to her popularity, and songs like the rollicking “Strange Things Happening Every Day” (1945) provide evidence of her show-stealing talent. But Tharpe’s career, which shuttled between sacred and secular modes, never settled into a niche that would have made her an avatar of any one musical moment. The music press could never quite place her either, inventing descriptions that complemented her honorific, like “holy roller singer” and “hymnswinger.”

In the 1940s, when big bands were hiring pretty girls with sweet voices to bob over their beats, Tharpe fronted Lucky Millinder’s raucous swing outfit with gutsy force. In the late 1950s, when blues revivalists prized rootsy growls and acoustic guitar twangs, she happily shouted praises over electric riffs. And when early rock historians reached back to trace the form’s lineage, this middle-aged lady cheerily shouting and soloing in front of robed choirs didn’t quite fit their secular, guitar-as-phallus ideal.

Rosetta Tharpe’s story, salvaged here by Wald, a professor of English at George Washington University, is very much a woman’s story, refreshingly free of Svengalis and impresarios. Her picaresque journey from Pentecostal child prodigy in Cotton Plant, Ark., to preteen phenom on Chicago’s church circuit to Cotton Club darling to one of gospel’s first recording stars is constantly surprising.

In Wald’s previous book, “Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture,” an academic examination of racial construction, she showed a taste for the messiness and necessary creativity at the margins of American cultural life. This interest helps her parse Tharpe’s musical contradictions and sensitively explore touchy issues like the hymnswinger’s rumored bisexuality, which some in her circle deny. The author finds humor and pathos in the tale of Tharpe’s third marriage — a publicity stunt worthy of reality TV, staged on the field of Griffith Stadium in Washington and followed by a concert performed by Tharpe in her wedding dress.

Absent the personal recollections of Tharpe, who died in 1973 at the age of 58, the book relies on intimates and musical heavyweights, from her singing partner Marie Knight to the gospel singer Willa Ward-Royster of the Ward Singers to Isaac Hayes. Count Basie’s trumpeter Sweets Edison recounts her scorching performance for “From Spirituals to Swing,” a groundbreaking 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall. And of Tharpe’s guitar prowess, Jeannette Eason, the wife of the steel guitarist Willie Eason, offers the assessment, “Rosetta got her man in her hand,” an elucidation that beats any cultural-studies jargon outright.

Of course, fellow musicians also give more sobering accounts of the obstacles confronted by this resourceful woman, whose livelihood depended on wowing affluent whites at the Cotton Club and touring the Jim Crow South in a cramped bus that doubled as diner and hotel. But the hard-earned joy of Tharpe’s ascent, which comes through in her music, regularly drowns out the heartbreak. Archival clips on YouTube support anecdotes like the one told by her fellow Apollo performer Inez Andrews, who remembers Sam Cooke chiding guitarists after they shared a stage with Tharpe: “Man, I wouldn’t let a woman outplay me!” Maybe not, but now they’ll all have to move over a step or two to make room for the good Sister’s big break into the canon of rock and soul legends.

By Laura Singra New York Times March 18, 2007

Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Up Above My Head