When the singer Little Richard died, in 2020, musical luminaries were quick to laud his influence. Without him, there would have been no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, no David Bowie, no Prince. Keith Richards said his music was “like taking the best acid in the world”. He was also a queer pioneer, a thunderous mix of power and flamboyance with a visionary genderfluid sense of style. Yet as two recent documentaries about him have suggested, he was scandalously under-appreciated for most of his life.
One of 12 children, Richard Wayne Penniman was born in segregation-era Macon, Georgia in December 1932. The two primary forces in his early life were religion and music (a duality embodied by his father, Charles, a deacon who owned a nightclub and sold bootlegged moonshine). Church music encouraged improvisation — you had to play loudly to be heard, and gospel was in many ways hard to distinguish from rock ’n’ roll. Richard particularly admired female singers like Clara Ward, who were able to sing extremely high.
His family described the flamboyant Richard as “troubled”. From a young age he wore his mother’s make-up and lipstick; girls loved him, but the boys hated him. Homosexuality was still illegal in the 1940s, and his family was steeped in religious conservatism., the south is the home of all things queer, whereby queerness encompasses any kind of difference.
