@blogdiva There is video of Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing a gig at a disused train station in Whalley Range, Manchester, to a crowd of mostly teenagers.
All of them white, all of them loving it, and more than a few of them who would go on to become massive names in the rock biz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGPx4ancGhg&list=RDjGPx4ancGhg
It is one of 2 gigs in the UK where relatively few people were in attendance, but the number of people, both major players in the industry and just members of the general public, who claim to have been there would mean the gig would have had to be at somewhere like Wembley Arena, not a small venue - the other, obviously, being The Sex Pistols infamous gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in June 1976.
I've always found it bizarre just how many Rock/Punk/Metal fans don't know the roots of their favourite music, insisting it is a purely white art form, that black musicians have soul and hi-hop while white guys have "heavier" forms of music.
A few years ago, I played Ernie Isley's searing axe solo from The Isley Brothers song "That Lady" for a metal-head I worked with, just to see his reaction - he flat out refused to believe it was from a 1974 song by a black soul/funk band, he thought it was something more modern by a white metal band with jazz influences.
Black musicians have historically been trail-blazers, often going uncredited and unpaid for their efforts - Gregory C Coleman springs to mind, his legendary 7 second drum break in "Amen Brother" by The Winstons (1969) is the most (over-) used sample in history, even beating Michael Jackson and James Brown combined, and is the basis for at least 3 different sub-genres of music, yet the man who played it died homeless and penniless, never knowing the effect he had on modern music.
Search "amen break", and be amazed at the way a black man you have almost certainly never heard of influenced modern music.