International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 9 • No. 9 • September 2019 doi:10.30845/ijhss.v9n9p8 58 Biographies of two African American Women in Religious Music: Clara Ward and Rosetta Tharpe Nana A. Amoah-Ramey Ph.D. Indiana University Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies College of Arts and Sciences Ballantine Hall 678 Bloomington IN, 47405 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. Keywords: African American Gospel and Religious Music, Women, Gender, Liberation, Empowerment Overview This paper is structured as follows: It begins with a brief discussion of the historical background of gospel and sacred music. This is followed by an examination of the musical careers of Clara Ward and Rosetta Thorpe with particular attention to the challenges they faced and the strategies they employed to overcome such challenges; and by so doing becoming major figures performing this genre (gospel and sacred music) of music. The next section is an elucidation and exemplification of the extent to which Clara Ward and Rosetta Thorpe’s music helped to liberate and empower them and also touched the lives of millions. The two quotations below (one by Horace Clarence Boyer, a Gospel Scholar, and the other by Willa Ward, Clara’s only sister) set the scene for the core part of the paper. “Sister Rosetta Tharpe did more than anyone else in introducing the music of the Negro Church to the World,” says Gospel Scholar, Horace Clarence Boyer. “Clara Ward is a woman who had pulled Gospel singing from local black churches and spread it lovingly over the Universe ‘the miracle girl’.” Says Willa Ward, Clara’s only sister. Historical Background of Gospel and Religious Music The process of transporting slaves from their African abodes to the new world resulted in the seizure of their political, cultural and social institutions. Subsequently, the enslaved Africans were thrust into an alien, and often, harsh environment that demanded immediate conformity to the ways and values of their European slave owners (the colonists) (Southern and Wright 1990). Both men, women, and children were workers who worked side by side in fields, forests, workshops, and households. Black women were made to produce children between every two and half years from age 19 till the age of 40. All children born in slavery were auctioned out into perpetual slavery. About one- third of slaves’ first marriages got broken by sale of their children or they themselves to different slave owners, families, and children getting away from the slave-homestead. These unfortunate sales, death, and other factors stimulated African Americans to form families from non-biological kin, and unrelated adult orphans. Working adults shared childbearing, and good friends and supporters (non-kin) became ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ (Painter 2006). Taking into consideration the prevailing circumstances and power relations, Black people cherished all black children, even those born of shame, abuse, or weakness. Family and Religion helped keep the slaves from the dehumanization of slavery. These everyday experiences including the spirits of struggle and resistance of slaves in the plantations featured as text in the evolution of the spirituals in the pre-gospel years (1900-1920). The beginning of gospel music cannot adequately be discussed without first acknowledging the foundation of its construction – the conversion of African slaves to Christianity. Before the eighteenth century, very few slaves had gotten converted to Christianity.