NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — Marie Knight, the Holmes Brothers and organ phenom Joey DeFrancesco will be taking the stage at Lincoln Center to honor Knight’s former singing partner Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Tharpe is best known for seamlessly stitching together gospel and secular music.
Knight, born in Brooklyn in 1925, began her singing career in the Oakwood Avenue Baptist Church Choir in Newark, New Jersey. She made recordings for both Brunswick Records and Mercury Records before teaming up with Tharpe. The duo played from coast to coast, brining in as many as 27,000 concert goers before going their separate ways in 1965.
Knight toured Europe and recorded sparingly throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 2003 she, along with others such as Joan Osborne, Odetta and Bonnie Raitt, helped create a tribute album to Tharpe entitled “Shout, Sister, Shout: a Tribute To Sister Rosetta Tharpe.” The album received critical acclaim.
Billboard magazine called the collection “a spirited and sincere tribute” while Women Who Rock magazine raved “[the album is] a heavenly homage to gospel’s forgotten goddess that’ll have even atheists shouting Hallelujah!” –by CelebrityAccess Staff Writers
