Little Richard's Witness

An intimate view onto the life of Little Richard, the trailblazing artist who helped create rock and roll out of the Black church traditions of the Jim Crow South—a rousing elegy for the Black church boy who harnessed his queerness to become one of the world’s great performers, even as he preached that that same queerness would bring damnation

Richard Wayne Penniman’s parents named him “Ricardo,” but his birth certificate read “Richard”: bureaucrats rarely cared enough to get a Negro’s name right in Depression-era Jim Crow Georgia, when many Black communities were struggling to determine what constituted normal conduct in the aftermath of slavery. Wherever that boundary was, Richard existed miles beyond it: he was a “sissy” boy, an evident fact that earned him brutal beatings from his father and sexual abuse from the church women meant to care for him. Richard’s salvation was that he came of age during the golden age of gospel music, and he loved to sing—and sing loud. At fifteen and kicked out of his father’s house, Richard was selling Coca-Cola at the local auditorium when he met his favorite singer, the gospel star Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who insisted he join her on stage. Sister Rosetta, rumored to be queer herself, decided to take the boy under her wing. So began a career that would change the course of music history, and also intensify the contradictions within the soul of a man who would reach great fame before renouncing it to become a seminarian and later a Bible salesman.

Ahmad Greene-Hayes, a bold, pathbreaking scholar at Harvard Divinity School who is himself Black and queer, recognizes his own church upbringing in Richard’s and resolves to witness the aspects of Richard’s life that remained shameful, half-hidden, unresolved. Little Richard’s Witness culls from vinyl, liner notes, Seventh Day Adventist papers, queer periodicals, and other ephemeral sources to glimpse the man as he was, reading between the lines of both Richard’s sermons and his extravagant stage performances. There, we find competing theologies of race, sexuality, and Black music in the twentieth century—theologies that resound again in our present moment of queer repression and racial violence propagated by a Christianity that fails to practice God’s love.