Biographies of Two African American Women in Religious Music: Clara Ward and Rosetta Tharpe

Abstract

This paper‟s focus is to compare the lives, times and musical professions of two prominent African American women— Clara Ward and Rosetta Thorpe — in religious music. The study addresses the musical careers of both women and shows challenges that they worked hard to overcome, and how their relationship with other musicians and the public helped to steer their careers by making them important figures in African American gospel and religious music. In pursuing this objective, I relied on manuscripts, narratives, newspaper clippings, and published source materials. Results of the study points to commonalities or similarities between them. In particular, their lives go a long way to confirm the important contributions they made to religious music of their day and even today.