Badass Women Who Changed The World

Sister Rosetta Tharpe is the queer black woman who invented rock n' roll. There before Elvis and Johnny Cash, she fused Delta blues, New Orleans jazz, and gospel music into one coherent sound in the mid-1930s, when she was just in her early twenties. She was among the first artists to use heavy distortion on her electric guitar, championing the rise of electric blues, and she influenced heavy hitters like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

After all of this, Sister Rosetta Tharpe just made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on December 13, 2017.