Goodbye, Little Richard

I just rejoined Medium in order to have someplace to just publicly say goodbye to Little Richard, Richard Penniman, the Reverend Penniman, the Queen of Rock and Roll. And my favorite of his generation of rock and roll stars.

Thanks to YouTube we can see Richard in full flight in 1966 in Paris — an absolute joy. He is blazing. Shirtless, steaming, sweating, swinging his shirt above his head and teasing the crowd. To watch this performance at this moment in early May of 2020 it is hard not to be in mind of Ahmaud Arbrey’s murder this year in Georgia, where Richard was born. Here is Richard, “letting it all hang out,” his frequent between song exhortation to audiences, 54 years ago. Yet this year in Georgia a man was killed for nothing more than being black.

Richard couldn’t have done anything but let it all hang out. Irrepressible is the word that comes to mind. In interviews he is impulsive and mercurial, probably on cocaine on some of them, but it is hard to tell the difference. He laughs at his own jokes and will make asides more sly and delightfully non sequitur than you’d expect from someone whose mind seems not overly concerned with keeping up with his mouth. He’s a riot, always entertaining, an undeniable character.

I read his autobiography in high school, and I’m not sure I was old enough for that material. It was profane, pornographic, gleefully homosexual/pansexual/!?sexual and I wondered how the man who drove his mother around LA could put all that in print for her to read. Richard struggled with his orientation, his vices and his calling, turning his back on rock and roll and returning to the church several times in his career. But his reservations about rock and roll stardom didn’t prevent him recounting his wild tales with relish.

His family nicknamed him “Warhawk” for his aggressive singing style. That voice. What a weapon. You can hear the church in Richard, and not just the gospel hymns, but revivalist preachers building sermons into crescendoes, torrents of emotion and fire. Richard skipped the crescendo, turned the heat up and blew fire the whole time.

Thank fucking God for Little Richard, man. And thank Little Richard for being Little Richard and never stopping for a beat. We should all be so free to let it all hang out. Thank you so much, Richard.