Reflections on ... Little Richard's Obituaries

Some random reflections on Bronze Liberace and all-round Flaming Creature Little Richard (born Richard Penniman, 1932 - 2020) after a week of sifting through the deluge of online tributes and obituaries. Some trends I noticed: a fixation with trying to pinpoint who the majestic Georgia Peach influenced rather than evaluating him as an artist in his own right.  The stale pale male hetero baby boomer guardians of hidebound rock history consistently gave the weird back-handed compliment that “without Little Richard, there would be no Beatles and / or Bob Dylan”, as if Richard’s greatest contribution or achievement was to beget those honkies. Younger writers (I try to never use the expression “millennials”, especially not as an insult) get similarly befuddled when trying to contextualize Richard’s legacy. For them, he’s primarily notable for influencing modern singers like Lizzo, Janelle Monáe, Lady GaGa … and Bjork?!

I haven’t seen a single reference to the late, great pioneering transsexual soul diva Jackie Shayne (1940 – 2019), who I’d argue is one of Richard’s spiritual heirs. (The outrageous and regal Shayne looked and sounded like a hybrid of Little Richard and Eartha Kitt). Or, for that matter, bold soul sister Tina Turner. The relationship between Richard and the turbulent Turners is under-documented. Richard freely admitted that hearing “Rocket 88” by Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm in 1951 “made my big toe shoot up in my boot” and profoundly fired his own musical imagination.  (He “borrowed” the piano intro to “Rocket 88” for his own “Good Golly, Miss Molly”). Ike Turner and Richard were life-long friends (Richard wrote the introduction to Ike’s 1999 memoirs Takin’ Back My Name and delivered a eulogy at Ike’s funeral in 2007). And – let’s face it – the two men shared a cocaine habit in the seventies. The details are vague, but intriguingly, Richard claimed that when young unknown Anna Mae Bullock first joined Ike’s band, Ike begged him to instruct the novice how to sing. “Ike came and asked me to teach her. He asked me, “How would you sing this song?” And when I sang, he would tell Tina, “Now that’s what I want you to do.” But when she [Tina] talks today, she never mentions my name.”” (Having read both of Tina’s autobiographies, he’s right. Tina mentions the personal significance of LaVern Baker, Sister Rosetta Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Otis Redding and James Brown on her singing - but entirely snubs Richard). So, in theory, it could be argued, without Little Richard, there would be no Tina Turner (or at least not the raw, unabashedly sensual lioness Tina Turner we now know and love).  

/ The tempestuous Ike and Tina Turner in the early days /

In fact, for mainstream white straight writers there’s been little attempt to analyze Richard’s musical output or persona outside of the prism of white rock’n’roll or to understand the flamboyant black urban “chitlin’ circuit” rhythm and blues milieu of strippers, drag queens and minstrel shows he emerged from. Tavia Nyong’o’s piece in The Guardian is exemplary for locating him in this context. Richard didn’t invent the wheel or emerge from nowhere. As Nyong’o argues, by the forties – when the teenaged drag queen Richard was performing in travelling minstrel revues under the name Princess Lavonne - there was already a vibrant “black sexual underground” of “freakish men” (this, Nyong’o notes, was how “the black speech of the period named gender-non-conforming males” and not necessarily a pejorative). Richard had no shortage of positive role models to emulate here. There was Richard’s complicated relationship with wild man mentor, friend and lookalike Esquerita (aka Eskew Reeder Jr, 1935 - 1986).  There was "Hip Shakin' Mama" Patsy Vidalia (1921 - 1982), the “femme impersonator” entertainer and emcee of New Orleans night club The Dew Drop Inn, where Richard performed. There was queer R&B singer Billy Wright (1932 - 1991), who encouraged Richard to adopt his own signature dandified style of thick pancake make-up, pencil-line mustache and processed pompadour “conk” hairstyle. In these circles, no one would have batted an eye over Richard’s songs “Lucille” (about a drag queen) and “Tutti Frutti” (a paean to the joys of anal sex). Maybe Richard’s gift to the world was to introduce aspects of this debauched queen-y subculture above ground into white popular culture, thus loosening it up? Provocatively, Nyong’o asserts that white rock critics have consistently dismissed and misunderstood Richard’s gospel records as “inferior” to his rock’n’roll work. Maybe it’s time for those to be reappraised?

/ Below: the enigmatic Esquerita /

/  File Under Sacred Listening: The King of the Gospel Singers (1962) /

In his New York Times opinion piece “Little Richard’s Queer Triumph”, Myles E Johnson vividly evokes Richard in concert in Paris in 1966. At a climactic moment he strips-off his sweat-drenched shirt and hurls it into the crowd. Regardless of gender, everyone there would have fought each other for this sacred artifact, “For those in the audience, it must have been fantastical to see, and a deeply erotic thing to witness. To think, in 1966, a black queer man - over the course of his life he would identify himself as gay, bisexual and “omnisexual” - could be a sex god. He was a symbol of brazen sensuality, three years before Jimi Hendrix would use his tongue and guitar to catapult a nation beyond their prudish sensibilities at Woodstock.”

I also loved David Remnick’s testimonial in The New Yorker. Summarizing Richard’s frenzied musical attack in the fifties, Remnick concludes “he is a human thrill ride.” How succinct is that? He’s also eloquent on Richard’s lifelong, agonizingly painful conflict between his sexuality and his fundamentalist Christianity. Some gay fans find it impossible to forgive the ailing Richard’s disillusioningly homophobic 2017 interview in which he disparages his past and his homosexuality. But walk a mile in Little Richard’s shoes. This was, Remnick reminds us, the kid whose father kicked him out of the family home aged 13 for his effeminacy and who grew up marginalized and bullied (“The kids would call me faggot, sissy, freak.”). “It seemed evident that Little Richard both thrived on his sexuality but suffered terribly from the time that he had been cast out of his own home as a boy. Despite the flamboyance of his performances and his carriage, he never quite settled, publicly, on a sexual identity. Sometimes, he would say he was gay, sometimes bisexual, sometimes “omnisexual”; there were moments, feeling the weight of his religious background, when he even denounced homosexuality.”

Unsurprisingly perhaps, it’s cult filmmaker and The People’s Pervert John Waters - always voluble about his worship for Little Richard - who says it best. “He was the first punk,” he exclaimed to Rolling Stone. “He was the first everything … to me, he was always a great figure of rebellion and sexual confusion. People didn’t talk about him being gay or anything. I don’t know if he was beyond that because he was so scary. They didn’t even know what he was. He was a Martian more than being gay. It was like he was from another planet.” Maybe that’s Little Richard’s crowning accomplishment. In real terms, his musical heyday was brief. But he defiantly let his freak flag fly and gave others the freedom to follow his example. All hail the queen! We'll never see his like again.

/ Little Richard looked exceptionally beautiful on this day /

/ Below: my boyfriend Pal's tribute to Little Richard. T-shirt via Printers Unknown / 

Further reading:

My account of seeing Little Richard give one of his final public performances at Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender in 2013.