Watch: Sister Rosetta Tharpe singing in this abandoned Manchester spot

On May 7, 1964, Granada Television staged the Blues and Gospel Train at the disused Wilbraham Road railway station in the Whalley Range suburb of Manchester — a decommissioned station on the Fallowfield Loop line, closed since 1958 and left to decay. Granada's production team dressed the platform to resemble a southern US railway stop, erecting a sign reading 'Chorltonville', and invited an audience of around 200 local people to stand on the platform while Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Rev. Gary Davis, and Cousin Joe Pleasant performed. The footage was broadcast on August 19, 1964.

The performance that has endured above all others from that afternoon is Sister Rosetta Tharpe's opening set, filmed in the grey Manchester light on a grimy railway platform with an appreciative crowd packed around her. Playing a white semi-hollow Gibson SG, wearing a red dress and furs, she delivered a performance of such raw electricity that the footage has become foundational viewing for anyone interested in rock guitar. Tharpe was the godmother of rock and roll — a gospel singer and guitarist who had been playing with a ferocity and technical command that would later define the electric guitar long before most of the men credited with inventing rock music had picked one up.

The station building has since been demolished, and the trackbed is now a cycling and walking path known as the Fallowfield Loop. No structure remains at the site. But the footage filmed here — Tharpe wailing into the Manchester sky, the crowd swaying, the whole scene impossibly raw — is one of the most extraordinary documents of live musical performance ever captured on film.