Little Richard's Witness
Liner Notes on Black Religion and Sexuality
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Listen with a free trial
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.
Little Richard's Witness
Pre-order Now for £12.84
-
Narrated by:
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, 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 as well as 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.
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
Critic reviews
"Little Richard's Witness is a cogent, heart-wrenching, captivating, and insightful portrait of one of the most significant and compelling figures in American music and popular culture. Greene-Hayes adds social history and cultural criticism to Little Richard's story, in a way that is compelling, highly readable, and deeply sensitive. I highly recommend it!" —Imani Perry, New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of South to America
"With a book that is brimming with information, consummately readable, and skin-to-skin intimate, Greene-Hayes rescues, then returns Richard Penniman to us: the church girls who loved church girls and the church boys who loved church boys and had to lie about it or risk violent exile. In Black Church parlance, this book is a second service, an appreciation, a homecoming." —aunjanue ellis-taylor, Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Primetime Emmy Award-nominated actor
"Greene-Hayes does not shy away from the 'gray' in this illuminating, rigorous exploration of the socioreligious and cultural world of the inimitable Little Richard. Rather than present him as an avatar without texture, nuance, or humanity, Greene-Hayes invites us to sit with Little Richard’s complexities, and, ultimately, with his unrelenting witness as a divine, fleshly messenger of Black queer possibility amid the historical conditions designed to restrict his freedom." —Darnell L. Moore, author of No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America
"With a book that is brimming with information, consummately readable, and skin-to-skin intimate, Greene-Hayes rescues, then returns Richard Penniman to us: the church girls who loved church girls and the church boys who loved church boys and had to lie about it or risk violent exile. In Black Church parlance, this book is a second service, an appreciation, a homecoming." —aunjanue ellis-taylor, Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Primetime Emmy Award-nominated actor
"Greene-Hayes does not shy away from the 'gray' in this illuminating, rigorous exploration of the socioreligious and cultural world of the inimitable Little Richard. Rather than present him as an avatar without texture, nuance, or humanity, Greene-Hayes invites us to sit with Little Richard’s complexities, and, ultimately, with his unrelenting witness as a divine, fleshly messenger of Black queer possibility amid the historical conditions designed to restrict his freedom." —Darnell L. Moore, author of No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America
No reviews yet