“She entranced audiences and inspired untold numbers of blues-loving players from across the pond, like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards”: Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s epochal performance at an English train station paved the way for the blues-rock revolution

Sister Rosetta Tharpe sings and plays a Gibson SG at Wilbraham Road Station in Manchester, England, while filming the Granada Television special Blues And Gospel Train on May 7, 1964.

On May 7, 1964, a who's who of future blues guitar luminaries – among them Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones – gathered, with a number of other excited blues fans, at the Wilbraham Road train station in south Manchester.

Clapton, Beck, and co. had journeyed to the out-of-use station all the way from London to see a show unlike any other – the Blues and Gospel Train.