Sister Rosetta

Frank Turner's Tales From No Man's Land

Somethin' Else

History

4.8 • 674 Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2019

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Frank Turner dives into the story behind his song Sister Rosetta. He talks to singer-songwriter Emily Barker and Nwaka Onwusa, curator at Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, about the life of the original sister of soul, the godmother of rock 'n' roll, the singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

You can buy and stream Frank's album No Man's Land here.

This episode was produced by Hayley Clarke and the executive producer was Peggy Sutton. There was additional production from Elizabeth Emery, Paul Smith, Steve Ackerman, Josh Gibbs and Charlie Caplowe. Tales from No Man’s Land is produced by Frank Turner, Xtra Mile Recordings and Somethin’ Else.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Something else.
0:03.0	Hello, I'm Frank Turner. Welcome to Tales from No Man's Land, my first podcast that accompanies my next album that happens to be called No Man's Land.
0:19.0	13 songs about historical women,
0:22.7	who you likely won't have heard of, but definitely should have.
0:26.3	Every week I'll be releasing a song
0:28.0	and telling you the story of the woman it's about right here.
0:31.6	Their stories are fascinating, moving, funny,
0:34.6	and most importantly, worth celebrating and sharing.
0:51.5	Music moving, funny, and most importantly, worth celebrating and sharing. So thanks everybody for tuning in to my podcast, and seeing as this is the first episode, it's probably worth me trying to explain what it is we're all doing here.
0:59.5	As a writer, I've spent most of my career to date doing two things, which was writing songs about myself and promising that I would never make a concept album.
1:06.9	And yet, here we are. Being a huge history nerd, I read an awful lot of history and through my
1:11.8	wanderings through the historical record, I keep a little mental file of stories that I come
1:16.0	across that I didn't know, that I think are interesting, and perhaps worth sharing at parties to
1:20.3	try and make myself sound more interesting. And given the nature of our history and our culture,
1:24.7	more often than not, those stories that I didn't know and that people tend not to know tend to be about women. After a while, these stories started beginning to turn
1:32.1	into songs and lo and behold, I've stumbled across a concept. In the beginning, it was just going to be
1:37.0	a handful, maybe an EP, but the stories kept coming. There were so many beautiful stories I wanted
1:41.0	to share, so after a while I ended up with an entire album, and it felt to me like it was worth getting deeper into the actual history behind these
1:47.3	songs, and so we have a podcast. So I thought I'd kick off with the story of Sister Rosetta
1:53.3	Thar. Godmother of Rock and Roll, the original sister soul, all our music was in her.
2:02.6	I read a lot of music history, being a musician, so I'm interested in the history of my trade and my craft.
2:08.7	And if you read about the history of rock and roll, you tend to sort of circle around this mystical figure of Sister Rosetta Thubb, about whom I essentially knew nothing.
	...

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