True Originals

There would be no Yola without rock-and-roll architect Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Now Yola gets to become her in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis.

- By Andrea Williams

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. It is late on a Sunday at Urban Cowboy, a hotel and bar in the heart of gentrifying East Nashville, and she will give anyone who will listen a lesson on who came before the King: “She clocked Little Richard out of a backwater in Georgia and gave him his rise to fame. If we don’t have that drag-wearing Black man being as free as he feels he can be, enough to inspire Prince”—her eyes widen as she imagines the alternate timeline—“then what happens if we don’t have Prince? We wouldn’t know what kind of postapocalyptic music nightmare we’d be in if we don’t hold things up to the light.”

But she isn’t losing sleep over the film’s slight depiction. Many Black artists might have balked at taking on the minor role given to a major artist in a biopic that once again centers one of the most famously overexposed white men in music history. For Yola, there was simply no passing up the opportunity to play a woman so integral to the development of her own sound. Born Yolanda Claire Quartey, Yola, 38, launched her career in England with a 2016 EP spanning rock, dance, and country-adjacent folk. Soon after, she took on Nashville, where she caught the attention of producer and Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach, who signed Yola to his label. Her debut album, 2019’s