The Golden Gate

The widely-acclaimed Sister Rosetta Tharpe is among the greatest Sanctified gospel singers of her generation; a flamboyant performer whose music often flirted with the blues and swing, she was also one of the most controversial talents of her day, shocking purists with her leap into the secular market. Playing nightclubs and theaters, she pushed spiritual music into the mainstream and helped pioneer the rise of pop-gospel. Tharpe was born March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas; the daughter of Katie Bell Nubin, a traveling missionary and shouter in the classic gospel tradition known throughout the circuit as "Mother Bell," she was a prodigy, mastering the guitar by the age of six. At the same time, she attended Holiness conventions alongside her mother, performing renditions of songs including "The Day Is Past and Gone" and "I Looked Down the Line."

British archival label Charly Records' Jefferson Airplane release At Golden Gate Park is billed on its back cover as the "first authorized release" of what annotator Jon "Mojo" Mills calls the band's "oft-bootlegged 7th May 1969 Golden Gate Park performance." Mills also calls this "the first official release" of the recording, but one must question what makes it official, much less authorized, as opposed to, say, "technically legal" in the sense that Charly has licensed it from Licensemusic.com APS, "courtesy of ABC Entertainment Gmbh."