.iamyola isn’t losing sleep over Baz Luhrmann's slight depiction of rock-and-roll architect Sister Rosetta Tharpe in ElvisMovie. AndreaWillWrite writes
Photo: Alysse Gafkjen. Hair and makeup by Sherita Leslie. Yola knows what some music heads will wonder after they watch her in Elvis, the latest cinematic spectacular from Baz Luhrmann: why Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the woman who invented rock and roll and became one of Elvis Presley’s primary Black influences, doesn’t get much more than a minutes-long performance of the spiritual “Strange Things Happening Every Day.” “Let’s just take one thread we can ostensibly trace,” Yola begins.
Singing in Elvis, of course, came easily to Yola, who regularly belted Tharpe’s gospel classic “Didn’t It Rain” in the shower growing up. She could perform off muscle memory and intuition, an asset Luhrmann saw when he hired her to cover a song for the soundtrack. The producers also knew she could match Tharpe’s vocals but couldn’t know for sure how Yola, who had never acted before, would do onscreen. Then came a recording session with Luhrmann on Music Row in 2019.
Photo: Alysse Gafkjen. Hair and makeup by Sherita Leslie. In Luhrmann’s film, the cradle-to-grave arc of Elvis’s life is filtered through the lens of Colonel Tom Parker, his eccentric Dutch manager , who, in the years following Elvis’s death, was found to have mismanaged the artist’s vast fortune.
Yola lived with Tharpe’s music for much of her life, discovering her in the stashes of record collectors back home in Bristol, England. As for Elvis? “I wasn’t aesthetically drawn to him as an artist to give enough of a fuck,” she says. But stepping into his world the way Parker saw it and Luhrmann interpreted it challenged her to consider less sinister reasons for Elvis’s mimicry. “You’re gonna experience Black shit if you’re just around Black people,” she says.
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