Religion’s hold on Little Richard, rock’s sex-amped founder
A ferocious pianist with a madcap rubberband of a voice and bombastic stage personality, Little Richard, who died Saturday at 87, will go down in history as a key architect behind years of rock’s music world dominance.
But though his pancake makeup and gaudy costumes oozed sexual ambiguity, Little Richard’s upbringing in the church underwrote his complicated lifelong journey with religion and sexuality.
Born Richard Wayne Penniman in the southern US state of Georgia, the performer was raised attending Seventh-day Adventist, Baptist and Holiness churches, where he would linger for the music, aspiring to a life as a minister.
He took early inspiration from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an influential artist of the 1930s and 1940s and forerunner of rock, who fused gospel and spiritual lyrics with the hip-shaking rhythms of R&B.
As a teenager he traveled around his home state as a part of medicine and minstrel shows, and by the 1940s and 1950s was a cross-dressing performer who later sang alongside strippers and drag queens.
Little Richard’s star was born in the mid-1950s with his defining hit “Tutti Frutti,” which intoxicated legions of teenage fans eager to break loose from buttoned-up mid-century America.
But it was only after re-writing a cheeky section of the song referencing anal sex that his producer released it.
As his fame soared Little Richard tore down barriers as a sexually fluid black man coming from the US south where the legacy of slavery and enduring segregation were still very much open wounds.
He splashed onto the thenmacho world of rock and changed it forever, electrifying the stage with his frenetic rhythms at the keys, sky-high pompadour and peacockish garb.
His flamboyant look echoed for generations among stars who would bend gender norms onstage including Prince, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Elton John and Mick Jagger.