LITTLE ROSETTA AND THE TALKING GUITAR

A small girl gets a big guitar…and the rest is history.

Pinkney Barlow, third generation of the renowned and artistic Pinkney clan, offers a tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “Godmother of Rock and Roll,” in swinging words and paper collage scenes featuring a child eagerly absorbing the love and harmonies of her African American community. Having listened to Momma strum a mandolin and danced to music each week with others in her hometown of Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Little Rosetta is thrilled to get a guitar of her very own and is determined to learn how to play it in time for next summer’s church anniversary. She carries it everywhere, listening to the sounds of her town, plucking the strings until her fingers are raw—and, when the time comes, letting loose with pure notes that “poured over the crowd like summer rain washing the dust off a new day.” Angled visual elements and occasional curved lines of narrative give a lively sense of musicality to the presentation, with lengths of actual string on the guitar and unglued paper edges around the dark-skinned human figures to add texture and dimension. Tonya Bolden and R. Gregory Christie take a longer look at Tharpe’s subsequent 50-year career in Rock, Rosetta, Rock! Roll, Rosetta, Roll! (2022), but both of these picture books offer high-stepping views of a child who taught herself how to make a new kind of music, one that “held the story of her people.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Speaks to all children with music in their heads while introducing an unjustly little-known pioneer.