Originally posted as #SistoryLessons newsletter, June 15, 2026
How many of you knew that June is Black Music Month? This celebration has been officially on the books since 1979, at the urging of the Black Music Association—President Carter signed the first proclamation on June 7 of that year. Just about every American popular music vibe you have ever loved was first shaped by Black brilliance: gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, rock and roll, soul, funk, disco, hip-hop, house, neo-soul, trap—and salsa, merengue, bachata, cumbia, calypso, and samba all trace their origin and soul back to Black roots.
This issue of #SistoryLessons shines a light on three Foremothers you may not know very well, who turned the guitar (so often associated with dudes) into an expression of their full female stories: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Lydia Mendoza, and Mary Kaye. For the sake of accuracy, I'll point out neither Mary nor Lydia are, strictly speaking, Black music artists—Lydia Mendoza built Tejano, a Mexican-Texan hybrid of corrido and German-Czech polka, and Mary Kaye built the Las Vegas lounge act on a Hawaiian instrumental inheritance. But there are linkages worth mentioning: Hawaiian steel guitar and Delta blues slide guitar are sonically related, and the Vegas lounge act Mary defined became the stage where Etta James, Della Reese, and Nancy Wilson shared their talents.
What unites these three women is an instrument with roots in Africa. Sister Rosetta on her Gibson SG, Lydia on her twelve-string acoustic, Mary photographed with the white-blonde Stratocaster that became known as her namesake. The guitar itself has a layered heritage: Spanish-Moorish in origin (a descendant of the oud), Black in its amplified electric voice, and reminiscent of its West African ancestors—plucked lutes that enslaved people remade in America as the banjo.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock and Roll
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born Rosetta Nubin on March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, to a cotton-picking mother who was also a traveling evangelist for the Church of God in Christ. Rosetta was performing with a guitar by age four, recorded "Rock Me" for Decca Records in 1938, and turned the gospel-blues guitar into something the country had never quite heard—a sacred instrument played with the velocity of the secular world. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, forty-five years after her death.
The men who would become music icons—Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis—all named Tharpe as the reason they picked up the guitar. Since this is still Pride Month, it's compelling to think the acoustic-to-electric transition in American popular music has a queer Black woman at the center. Rosetta Tharpe had a long romantic partnership with gospel singer Marie Knight in the late 1940s, and while some in the gospel community turned their backs on her for this, the broader community protected each other's privacy over public disclosure.
She toured with Marie Knight from 1946 to 1950 in what is now widely understood as a romantic partnership. She suffered a stroke in 1970, lost her left leg to complications from diabetes, and continued touring with one leg until weeks before her death on October 9, 1973, in Philadelphia. Sister Rosetta was buried in an unmarked grave for thirty-five years, until a Pennsylvania state historical marker went up in 2008.
Reflection: What gifts have you shared with the world, even when someone else got the credit?
Lydia Mendoza: The Lark of the Border (La Alondra de la Frontera)
Lydia Mendoza was born in Houston, Texas, on May 21, 1916, into a Mexican immigrant family that traveled the Texas-to-Michigan migrant labor circuit playing for tips. Mendoza learned twelve-string guitar from her mother on a homemade instrument, sang on street corners and plaza stages before she could vote, and recorded her signature song, "Mal Hombre," for Bluebird Records in 1934 at age seventeen—for roughly fifteen dollars.
That single record sold across the Southwest and into Mexico, turning a seventeen-year-old in a hand-sewn china poblana dress into the most famous woman in Mexican-American music. She toured continuously for the next fifty years, performing in cantinas, migrant camps, prison yards, dance halls, plazas, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Festival of American Folklife on the National Mall, recording more than fifty albums in Spanish. She raised four daughters on the road and was paid in coins for decades. She received the National Heritage Fellowship in 1982 and the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton in 1999.
Reflection: What rhythms carry your family's or community's history?
Mary Kaye: Lounge Lady
Mary Kaye was born Mary Ka'aihue on January 9, 1924, to a Hawaiian musical family. By the late 1930s the Ka'aihue siblings were performing as a family act in Chicago hotels. A later configuration, the Mary Kaye Trio, defined the late-night Las Vegas lounge act in the late 1940s and early 1950s—an after-hours casino show that became the structural template for Las Vegas itself.
That lounge format mattered because Las Vegas in those years was a Jim Crow town. Black headliners like Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, Nat King Cole, and Lena Horne sold out the casino showrooms but were barred from staying in the hotels, eating in the restaurants, or using the swimming pools. The Mary Kaye Trio, racially ambiguous to a white American audience that did not know what Native Hawaiian was, slipped past Jim Crow. Mary was aware of the system, and tipped the Black musicians who came through the lounge to jam after their headliner sets. The format she invented became the primary Vegas stage for Black women singers from the 1960s on, including Etta James, Della Reese, Esther Phillips, and Nancy Wilson.
In 1956 Fender released a custom Stratocaster designed around Mary's playing—white-blonde body with gold hardware, the first guitar Fender ever named after a woman. It's still in production. She retired from regular performance in the 1970s, taught privately, and lived in Las Vegas until her death in 2007.
Reflection: The Stratocaster that bears her name still sells in boutique guitar shops for upward of $3,000, but her own records are hardly known. How does that make you feel?
Reflection and Action
Sister Rosetta Tharpe's music had the power to lift people out of their seat. Who does that for you today?
Thinking of Lydia Mendoza: how does music preserve cultural identity? Write about a song that connects you to your roots.
Mary Kaye's father had to take a stereotypical stage name in order to have his career, and she had to shorten her own name to reach a mainstream audience. What other examples come to mind of entertainers erasing their culture or ethnicity to reach a mainstream (white) audience?
Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends
In honor of Black Music Month, learn more about the traditions that surrounded Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The National Museum of African American Music in Nashville is one place to start.
To celebrate Lydia Mendoza, elevate Tejana and Chicana artists in cultural preservation efforts.
Considering the Native Hawaiian culture that is Mary Kaye's origins, learn more about the Hawaiian Kingdom. The Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement is one organization doing that work.
What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember
Sister Rosetta Tharpe carried a Pentecostal hand-clap into Carnegie Hall, Lydia Mendoza recorded a genre-defying ballad alone at seventeen, in Spanish, and Mary Kaye turned the late-night Vegas lounge into a stage where Black women singers locked out of casino hotels could make their careers—and she tipped the Black musicians who came to jam, because she knew where her position in the system cost less than theirs did. These women teach us a lot about heart, soul, generosity, truth, and joy. Speak your truth, with joy and conviction, and it may surprise you how many people join in.
Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research.