IN HIS mercurial and eccentric biopic Elvis, Baz Luhrmann imagines the young hero in Mississippi witnessing, in adjacent venues, mesmeric performances of blues and gospel music. The scene is a not-so-subtle representation of Elvis’s dual musical parentage; but, in reality, the two gene pools had already combined in the music of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “the godmother of rock ’n’ roll”. Using as an excuse the anniversary of her 1964 Granada Television appearance from a disused Manchester railway station, Archive on 4: Sister Blues (Radio 4, Saturday) presented a fascinating and immersive account of Sister Rosetta’s career and why it mattered.
Sister Rosetta cut her teeth in the churches of Arkansas and Chicago, but, from the late 1930s, she occupied that hazy border between the sacred and the profane. Her rendition of the notionally spiritual anthem “Rock me” has an unsettling earthiness, which disturbed the more conservative gospel community, while her espousal of electric blues provided inspiration to artists distinctly outside the pious elect.
Among the many commendable aspects of this documentary, presented by Joan Armatrading, was the willingness to get into some technical detail. So we heard all about the distinctive plucking gesture employed by blues artists, and the dangers of moving past the 12th fret. Sister Rosetta was, indeed, the consummate rock-’n’-roller: a musician blessed from above with brilliant musicianship and from below with a worldly instinct for unashamed self-promotion. Witness the story of her organising a (third) wedding for herself as a publicity stunt before she had even decided who should be her spouse.
Some people are blessed — or cursed — with that level of chutzpah. Take Joachim Boldt, the German anaesthesiologist who was the subject of Retracted (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week). It is not known exactly how many of the more than 100 scientific papers that Boldt published were based on fabricated evidence, but it is clear that he duped colleagues and fellow professionals for many years before exposure in 2010.
Was it a compulsive disorder? the small lie compelling bigger lies? or an addiction to status? The presenter, Rosa Ellis, a higher-education journalist, did not get very far with motivation, but she did give us some sense of the academic environment in which all this played out. Still, there was no satisfactory answer to the crucial questions: How did these papers get published in the first place? What happened to the peer-review process? Steve Shafer, the editor of one journal, bleats: “It’s a subject process.”
In the light of our recent intense debates about multiculturalism, Assignment (World Service, Tuesday of last week) provided a story from Monfalcone, in Italy, whose mayor is reported to have banned collective prayer at the town’s two Islamic centres, and the playing of cricket, beloved of the large Bangladeshi community, employees of the town’s shipyard. To its credit, the programme allowed the mayor to get in the first word; and the story has far more to it than mere xenophobia on the part of a local “far-Right” politician.